Mike Minutes Mastermind 03/02/2023

Hey, Gust Nation. Hope you're doing well. Let's go ahead and get kicked off. Let me just drop this in the Facebook group real quick.

Cool. Right.

Thanks for letting me do this a little bit later tonight. This morning we were flying.

And there we go. Cool. Yes. This is scheduled actually for a couple months back.

But meet Kevin, who I was shadowing today. His jet had had an issue with it a couple months ago, so I came over here now, which is unfortunate because I was hoping to have all March, April, May and June completely at home. But hopefully the last of the last. Yeah, it was good. I'm sure there's probably some questions about it, so I'll just go through the questions. I saw those 17 questions that came in. So we went from zero yesterday to 17 today. So I'm sure there's probably some questions about what I was doing with me Kevin today. So I'll go the questions and then if not, I'll recap at the end. So let's go ahead and jump in. Boom.

Make sure my audio is set up correctly. One second.

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Okay. Hunter for Mariata. My question is about scalping services. If there is a matrix or multiplier used. Trying to decide if I use the same detachment because both end up with a lot of clippings in the end. Yeah, I would recommend doing that. Typically what we do is we start mowing the first week of March and so we don't. You probably don't need to mow until like the third or fourth week of March. But that gives us an opportunity to kind of really cut low those first couple services. Now if a customer actually asked for us to scalp it, we'd probably charge the price for dethatching. You're 100% right. So Vineyard market is very common that people like know that they're supposed to scalp their lawn. Great. Most people don't know that that's really healthy for the lawn and they just freak out by the fact that takes three to four weeks to come back looking good. Because I'm. Sometimes there'll be spots where it's a little patchy when it comes through. So if you, if you're in your market though, that's like very common people asking that service. That's probably what I would charge is the dethatching price. Garrett from Glendale, Colorado. Would you ever consider hiring a full time estimator in North Carolina? Potentially only during spring rush for all your location to share in order to make spring rush more smooth for your DMs, but allow these locations to all still be timely on drive by and in person essence through spring rush. Would this make a GM feel like they had less control over their revenue numbers? That the last part is why I would try to not do it. This makes the most sense from a profit maximization standpoint and allowing those locations to grow beyond, you know, 6, 7,000, 6, 700,000 for example, what you could do. This is not, I'm not saying this is a bad thing. You could do this, you could have an estimator for like three months out of the year. So they could probably get like 7,800,000 with a little more ease.

By having an estimator for just a few months out of the year. However, you're going to take that power out of the GM's hands and that's the power I want them to have by making all the buying decisions, hiring decisions and fully filling in control of their numbers. And also the crew doesn't know that estimator potentially and that is really who's determined their budget hours. So their P for P of the entire crew is being determined by that person as well. Teresa Smith from Nampa Location Good morning Mike. We woke up to snow this morning and are wishing for spring. Quick question on budget hours. We did solo routes mowing last summer but plan to do two man cruise this spring. If the goal is six budget hours per day for solar routes, what is the total? What is the budget hour goal for two man cruise? Thanks. I would still just roll with 12 so like I'd still do 75%. It's just going to take them probably a little bit longer in terms of clock time. But I would still from a budgeting perspective stay the same. That's why it's always like just, just always assume 75% efficiency regardless is the best way to do it. Knowing that even if they, if they're doing some projects they're probably going to beat that pretty easily and if they're doing solar routes, they're probably going to beat that a little bit. But I would just stick with that in terms of staying consistent so you can easily schedule out into the future and project when new jobs can be scheduled.

Max from Burnaby I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it seems that my mobile users are still being charged at $20 a month despite emailing Gabriel. Email him again. That's all I can say honestly. Email him.

Let me think who else. That's literally the only person we have.

Here.

I'll put in the Facebook group. Max, if you could do me a favor. When you hear this, put in the Facebook group what is who are the in addition to Gabriel Downey@serviceoff.com who else should we email if we are not getting users discounted? Put that as a question in the Facebook group. I'll respond with the email of a gentleman by the name of Michael Penn who is kind of our liaison. He doesn't know service offbot very well, but he seems to have some sort of like he can make people do things but he doesn't know the software at all and somehow is our product our rep. So do that and I'll give you his email so you can bother him a little bit too. Oh, it's gonna be a Performance Max question. Here we go. Garrett from Glendale I've created multiple Google Performance Max campaigns. See picture attached each one each with one service in mind, as well as a campaign for a small 1 mile radius.

Where I use the name of the neighborhood, Washington park, in the ad copy testing to see if I can get better results this way. Does it defeat the purpose of Performance Max to essentially diversify and run multiple campaigns? No. Is it a good idea to make some quick selfie videos of us and our trucks working in the neighborhood and add them to campaigns? Yes. What are the KPIs? The relationship between those KPIs and target ranges for those KPIs concerning advertising, I'd be looking mostly at like if you are marketing prior to Spring rush, you can't judge that marketing platform because 95% of the performance of that is going to depend upon the weather. Literally as you lead up to Spring rush, really knowing like if you have a really solid three days of sunshine the week before Spring rush, you could crush it the week before. The same ads, same targeting, everything could be five to six times as much cost per click cost for acquisition. There's no, there's no need for your services when the grass isn't growing. If you're trying to, if you're trying to target for mowing, right? So we all need to realize that marketing outside of Spring Rush, when everyone needs your services, your customer acquisition cost will be all over the place. Like all over the place. You have to realize that as a blended average, I typically see during Spring Rush your customer acquisition cost being between like 30 and $50. And during, during, outside of Spring Rush, I see anywhere from like a hundred to five hundred dollars. So just keep that in mind. And that range is so big because like the weather plays like you just need a storm in the winter and now your property cleanup Ads are going to get way better click through rates, so just keep that in mind.

4. Would it be possible to get a general sheet of KPIs and target ranges and maybe how they relate to each other? Maybe tied to the document Nick requested for a list of formulas? Yeah, like, it's just so, like, like the range I just gave you is so wide. It's because we're in a seasonal business that is dictated by the weather. And so that's why I always kind of get a kick out of people and they're like, oh, I changed this ad on this week versus this week and this changed my ad. It's like, look, if this week the weather was bad and this week where the weather is good, you could do run the exact same ads and have a 90 to 100% increase in clicks. You could have a tripling in clicks simply because people are looking. And so there's way more demand. Therefore their prices, your price, cost per click is gonna go way down. Keep that in mind. Like everyone is just kind of keep that in mind. I always see that people, they'll make a tweak on their ads and they're like, oh, it changed. No, you were running ads two weeks leading up to spring rush. The first week there was bad weather. The second week was like the week before spring rush. The start r grass started growing and he had a few really good days of sunshine and the phone started ringing off the hook. Right. And that's why it will happen. Spring rush will usually in almost all of our markets start within like a very, very quick amount of time.

In terms of this overall philosophy. I love it. If you have the time to, to tweak these ads, way Great. Do it. 100. The problem I see most of the time, if you're actually seeing this running, Garrett, keep doing it. You're, you're, you're customizing each ad with the name of the neighborhood, etc. And doing a one mile radius. Great. The vast majority, not a lot of people, if they try to do this, you won't be able to get the ads to run because there's not enough traffic and there's not enough people searching. So just keep that in mind for everyone that reads. It's like, oh, it's a brilliant idea. Try it. Go for it. You can do it 100%. Just keep in mind that.

For, for some of you, there will not be enough traffic for Google to run the campaign. It'll just stop. It will not go anywhere.

Garrett from Glendale using ChatGPT. Do you see a potential use in generating more leads via Facebook, via blog post on Facebook Next or other platforms. It sounds like blog posts on websites are no longer a good strategy. It's not like again, AI has become a buzzword. We've been using Jasper for.

Two and a half years to create all of our SEO and our tags and our keywords. We have it scrub the site and then we ask it for what it thinks the best keywords are. We target the individual cities. We then have those smashed up to make your text for each of your sites. And then we take that creative, we pull it out and we ask what words need to be changed to make this more customized and not feel like a robot. Like making it more readable and good copy and not just great SEO. So like we Jasper's been around for a while, probably three years. It's been a solid product. So I wouldn't worry about creating blog posts though we have several already on the page for everyone that you know links up to like the pricing page, things like that.

You can absolutely do it. You can absolutely do it. Just keep in mind when you have a tool like Chat DBT available now to everybody and everyone's using it, the only way to differentiate yourself is to do what others cannot. And if everyone has access to the same tools, doing what everyone else has access to doesn't separate yourself or differentiate yourself. Right. What Chat GPT can't do is create an ad based upon a local happening in your market that only your city knows about and is in the news for a week. That's a big deal in your area. And make an ad around that. You can't do that. You can't figure that out. That's what still like a human's marketing mind will be needed. For Kevin from Bloomingdale, I'm getting ready to send a one click excellent email for spring cleanups. I'm tempted to individually email all my existing recurring clients for my Augusta email because I get a significant increase in response and and then sending a one click to all the rest of the clients in my database through Zooper. I think the downside of this would be that I want customers to get used to seeing and responding to one click estimate emails from the no reply email. What would you recommend? I would definitely try to use the one click estimate email format. The no reply, especially on.

Something like initiating mowing service is really helpful because you will see that like I don't reply and they don't even. They don't worry about it. Although obviously your contact information to the bot at the bottom. The other big, the bigger issue is the reason why that you need a CRM to do bulk emailing is because if you did what you're thinking about doing and I send it from your person, from your company email, you'll end up getting flagged for spam because you're sending like the same email from the same response. That's why like a CRM or a mailchimp is really required because otherwise what you could do is just copy a whole bunch of people into BCC blind carbon copy and just send it to all your customers. You get flagged very quickly for that and then all of your emails start going as spam. To be careful about that. This is why like literally once every one or two years, whether it be service all part in most CRMs they'll immediately all of a sudden there'll be a change in, in how the back end is looking at that, that the way that they're doing their email filing and you know, all of a sudden like for a few days those are all going to spam. It'll be like really intermittent and then you have to change the back end code to basically adapt to their algori to make sure your email is not being is marked as spam. So I don't know. I got that. Sorry. Oh yeah, just don't, don't. I would not recommend sending hundreds of emails from now. If you're talking about 10 or 15, you probably get away with it. But anything more than that, if you're sending out manual emails from your, your, your email, it's very likely it's going to get flagged and then blacklisted. So just keep that in mind.

Connor from Huntersville. I was talking to someone who worked for Google tonight about all the small issues we had across the new locations. After some time we get got to looking at the website and how it was ranking. He briefly explained the title tags to me after discovering we only appear on Google if you search lawn care near me. He recommended we add landscaping as a title tag or something to this effect. Because we did not show up in at least the top 20 business on Google for the search. I agreed that people might more commonly Google landscaping when looking for simple service projects like we do. Although I see how many people may also Google landscaping looking for hardscaping services we don't offer and this might dilute the good leads. Do we only have lawn care as a tile tag on the main site? If we have landscaping other title tags on, maybe we just aren't Ranking for some other reason. Part of my very little knowledge in this topic. Just trying to understand to help grow as quickly as possible and organically as possible. P.S. we are on mobile. Not sure if that changes on desktop. So we do have title tags for landscaping. You're 100% correct. While people search for landscaping a lot more often. And so that's why it takes us longer to rank. Your site is like a couple of weeks old, so it's not going to rank for landscaping right now.

And so we actually look for the title tags that are in each of your markets that are less least used because that will usually boost you the quickest to the top. And then you go after the hard, the heavy hitters of like landscaping and mowing.

We go after those later on. So like in your case, you know, it looks sounds like lawn care is the one that we probably targeted first. But the title tags for landscaping is in there. It just the vast majority of landscapers have landscaping in their title tags and that's what they're going after. So it takes longer for a new location to rank well on those. But yeah, you have landscaping, lawn care and then if you've added like hardscaping and things, then we put those in there too.

Dustin from Champagne when we do, when we are doing door hangers, how important is that we remember pricing given to the customer's lawn. For instance, we do a 5 round and put 4060 in spring rush. But forget and a month later there's a different price on the same door hanger to the same person. Big deal. Or just close them at all costs. When growing.

I would just say just roll right. I wouldn't worry about this. Like what you're saying is like what happens if you give a price to the same person twice the chances of them remembering or keeping both of them is so low. I would not be concerned about this one quick. I forget who was talking to me about this. I forget sick. They were doing the door hangers and they would take the instant quote door hangers and they just put like three different prices, like 40, 60, 50, 75 and 6090 for the mowing prices and they'd have all three and they just go down the road and then that way they have to draw right up the prices for every single lawn. They just have to pick between three and then what they could do is they could give it to someone that was like way less experienced. Be like hey, go to a lawn. On the average houses, put this middle one, if it's really, really small, put this Number one. And if it's really big, put number three. But always put number two. Unless it's small. Really small, overly big. Great option. I think I really like that idea. So you're not having to put a price in every single door hanger if you're doing multiple doors like a whole neighborhood. In this case though, I would not worry about remembering this because remember in the top left hand corner of the instant quote door you're putting the date and it says seven days. It's valid for seven days. So as long as you're not doing the same house within seven days with a different price, you're fine. I would not be concerned about that.

Connor from Evansville. I was wanting to make some business cards where we can have QR codes on the back of the guy's business cards so we can help with reviews and added bonuses for them. Every time I try to make a QR code out of our link, it just takes me back to Google Maps. Every time I make a QR code, is there any way I can do it? And it take us straight to the review landing and not the maps landing page you need. Connor, you need to use the text link on your Google listing account. Yeah, let's pull it up Resta Lawn care.

See if I can pull mine. Here we go.

Oh, don't make me log in. Come on.

Quickly. All right, here you go.

Boom. Share this tab, any this fancy thing, I should be able to switch between tabs easier. Okay, so when you're here, ask, review, use this link right here. This is their link you want to use. If you just put a link to your Google page, it's going to. Yeah, take them to the whole thing. But this is. This one should work just fine.

Yeah. So if you're going to make a QR code, use that one and you should be good to go. What I wish you could do is have it pre filled somehow to make sure you could tag some of the guys. But yeah, we're working on something with copilot that could potentially do this. But it's very. It's a little technical to try to distinguish between QR code. Basically you could have different QR codes for each of your crew members. The fact is like, it's gonna be such a pain to switch these out and then people leave and they have a whole bunch of QR business cards that can't be used. But technically you can make a QR code for each of your guys. And then like if they hand something and someone scans it and they become a Customer you'd be able to see. But it's honestly just a lot of very manual like you got to print them all and then if someone leaves, you literally have a whole bunch of business cards are unusable. So it's tough. But in terms of like this specifically create the QR code to that link and you should be good. Connor from Evansville.

Had a client that accepted mowing in February, very early for most customers. She emailed and requesting an email for auto payment information. She emailed and requesting an email for auto pay information. Eli told me today on connecting that the auto pay information is not installed until the job is scheduled.

Okay. It's automated. Yeah. If we are requiring CC on credit card file for customers 1 customers, then why would the email be sent if their account is incomplete without. Okay, I see what's happening. My question would be, if she accepted mowing, why would you not be putting her on the schedule? I'm assuming you don't know when you're gonna start mowing. That makes sense.

Yeah. So basically the sequence is when someone gets on the, gets put on the schedule. The part of the scheduling email that says okay, your first service will be X is when that trigger putting something on the schedule triggers the automation to get their payment information. So you could do this manually? Absolutely. Just don't add the tag that says manual credit card and it would send it to them, no problem. But just know that like the automation of asking for their credit card information happens when you schedule them. Are we able to change the automation to where the credit card request forms ask me accepted and not after? Yes, you can do that if you would like.

You're just running the risk of someone giving you card information and freaking out because like you set them up on scheduling and you're like six weeks out, for example, and they put their card information on file. And like you could absolutely do that though. 100%. We've just, we've just seen that they fill out the card information. Most like the click through an actual getting card information in their account is a lot higher when they have a scheduled date. So that's what you scheduled. That email gets fired off and then we're telling them which day they're on service. Those two emails come in together. But my ideal scenario is that there's not very email, but it's when they click on accept quote that they have to put the payment information in there.

So. But you could absolutely do that 100%. I usually don't schedule jobs until the command until the credit card Information is put in. I usually then have to then have to have command center call the customer and say that we cannot start the job until they put in a car. Yeah, you can absolutely do that if you would like. 100%. Like I said, this will be solved down the road with copilot when we have them have to put their card information just to accept the quote. But if you want to you can just change the automation to be to send them the that form when the job is when the estimate is marked accepted instead of when it is put on a schedule. You could absolutely do that. 100%.

Yeah, we just typically like to. We've just seen people click through that email more when they have a scheduled date already attached to it. Instead of just getting it, they click accept. Then inside their inbox and email says like go ahead and put your credit card file. And they don't even know like what day they're showing up yet. It's like in the perfect world which we're probably year, year and a half away from this, they put their car on file, accepts it and it tells them what day they're going to be scheduled on next in the process of checking out. So that way the highest level of trust. We already can automate the scheduling process based upon budgeted hours, based upon geography like map code, et cetera. But we're a little ways of watching that still. Kyle, can you get loans to fund a new location during a recession or would it be better to just pay cash? Each new location you open up you can get loans absolutely. A 7A loan to SBA is probably your best bet. It's just that your interest rate right now is going to be probably 8% honestly. So it's just. It's just a lot more expensive than it was even a year ago, two years ago.

They're going to be probably a little more stringent now too because they know higher interest rate typically goes to a higher qualified buyer. Kyle from Bloomington, Illinois how do. How do. How. How do you divide ambition and greed? Deep question. Ambition.

And greed. Okay. What practice keep you personally? Ambitious, yet not greedy. Something I've been thinking lots through lately. Keep killing a destination. I ask a question, ambition and greed. I would personally this is probably the wrong answer. This is how I like in my gut hicculus. I feel like ambition is the drive to do something. Greed attaches to the fact that the reason why you're doing is somehow going to hurt other people or it is going to somehow.

Negatively impact those around you. So I think ambition is like how do I get there? Greed is, is the intent for getting there, correct? Right. Because someone could have plenty of ambition and just want to get a lot done for other people and accomplish a lot of things or potentially today is like building things and they have a lot of ambition to get there. The question is why do you want to get there? And if that the why behind your ambition is going to negatively impact other people, that's probably what I would call greed. Just right off the to get.

I think it's super easy to, to, to, to see greed. Honestly, I like, I think someone who is like doesn't hold the door for people, doesn't treat the wait staff at a restaurant correctly, doesn't say thank you and have good manners to people of service. Those people given money become greedy in my opinion because they don't see how they play a simple part in the lives of those around them. And therefore when they're given the fuel of money, like just a bunch of money given to them, they treat other people with less respect and they're willing to usually step on other people to get what they want. So that's why everyone's like, oh, people with all this ambition, all this money are greedy. It's like, no, the fact is they probably had ambition. If they're greedy, it just means that once they get the money they start stepping on other people and they're okay with stepping on other people in order to reach their goal versus someone who has ambition. But it's not greedy. Like they're going to do it in a way that they are going to treat other people well around them. And when they reach their goal of that is fueled by the ambition they're going to typically.

They'Re going to be the type of person that people want to be around like regardless of how much status or money they have. So yeah, good question. That's Deep Carrot from Glendale. Why have you not implemented pest waste removal at your locations? I have not done it myself yet. However, I feel like the pros outweigh the cons. If you only do it for mowing customers, when you mow and are already at their property, I feel like it would be 50% margin in year round work. It's a simple service, low cost of equipment, increase the value and stickiness of your service. When you can mow and pick up poop. If you charge $20 weekly and 25% margin of your 200 customers and 25% of your 200 customers accepted service, that would be $52,000 annual revenue. But more importantly, at 50% margin, $26,000 in annual profit. Are these numbers inflated? Can you only charge $10 a service? Okay, so first of all, you're assuming that 25% of your customers need pickup and are willing to pay for it. I think that's too high. Personally, I would say it's probably 10%, 10 to 15 max.

And so again, on 200 mowing customers, I'm going to be probably doing a.

$600,000 business, hopefully at least assuming I'm doing some simple weather projects. So I'm doing a $600,000 business and I'm going to be doing this for $52,000. In your example, which I think it's going to be less than half of that. But let's just use your example. That is still less than 10% of my annual revenue. And it's not a service that I'm going to add because it's just simply not going to make enough revenue to actually move the needle. And first of all, if it was these numbers, I might consider it, but I just don't see $52,000 coming out of 200 customers. I don't think 25% of customers need it and I don't think they're going to charge. They're going to be willing to pay 20. I don't think that 25% of 200 million customers.

For pickup of their poop, I think they might be willing to pay 10, 15 or 20. Yes, that's actually not too bad. But I think it's 10 to 15% of people. And on 200 million customers, I could add something like coration and potentially get 30% of my customers to do that service a whole lot more. Like in one service, capture all the revenue I would otherwise be doing from the pickup of the dog poop. It's just another thing I have to keep track of. I know that people do it. I'm fine with that. I think it's great. Add extra margin, you make that service much more profitable. Personally, I don't want the guys have to deal with it. I don't want them to deal with the poop in the, in the trucks or in the trailers or those, those things spilling or stinking in the heat. I don't have to worry about having to grab, grab having little grabber things or dog bags. It's just another thing I have to think about. So I'm not going to do that for anything less than 10% of revenue if a service is not going to add but 10, 15, even 20% of revenue to my bottom line. I don't even want to think about it. Right. I'm only that it's only because I'm in more of a profit mindset. You're in grow, grow. That's fine. Just realize you're going to. You're going to spend a couple of years taking all those services away. And I wish that I wouldn't have done that. Like I spent the past three to four years take away all the services that I added to the Bellingham shop for example that I wish from day one I would have just focused marketing the simple services that I I know I could do. I can be profitable and can do without me. I didn't have a bunch of headache and thinking about oh man. Didn't have that crew didn't have the doggy bags. They skipped Mr. Jones's dog pickup but they did the lawn. Well now Mr. Jones is unhappy because they did one but not the other. But the guys didn't want to do it because they had the bag. It's like personally I'm not going to do that for like a 5, 10% of revenue. I don't think it'd be 10% in this case either. And so that's just why I don't do it. It's not to say you shouldn't do it. Like if you are solo operator one employee you could probably easily do this. Add an extra few thousand dollars which is more meaningful. I'm. I think it's great. It'll likely be a service that when you get to the point where you want to get out daily operations you're like it's not worth the headache. It's not worth an extra 3, 4, 5% of revenue at the end of the day.

This is from Anonymous as your look as our location reaches for the 500k mark this year which would be a 200k year over year growth, it seems as though it would be. It would be critical to remain focus on selling versus being in the field. Okay. In the past when I'm in the field with the team members, we generally beat budget hours and everyone wins. I understand completely. That's critical. I train them to perform correctly and efficiently. I do not want to remove this sense of urgency at becoming self sufficient. My presence in the job almost guarantees being budget hours. Question when the most expensive member owner or GM is not working the job.

Is it wrong to shift the percentages or remove P4P benefits from that job in order to incentivize independence? Would this be a strategy used towards New hires then removed after a certain point. So the GM or owner can be in the field in the future, rubbing elbows with the team every now and then. Or is it more beneficial that they feel the wins immediately? I wouldn't recommend doing this. You're starting to complicate P4P too much. I saw someone the other day, they had PVP really humming along. Well, they're outside of Augusta and they. They were canceling the subscription with P4P. So I was like, hey, like, what's up? I knew it was going really well. And sure enough, the past last year they tried to get funny with it and all their crew revolted on them. And I can't blame them because they started moving, okay, so certain percentages on certain times of the year, then they had. If you have different levels of years of experience and then you have certain types of services, they had different percentages for that. So there was literally a few time cards where I saw they had four different percentages for different services for how many people were in their truck. Like they had all these different things. I was like, this is way too complicated. I would not recommend doing this. I understand that when a GM or owner's on the job that they're going to work faster, but you shouldn't penalize them for that. Because the reason they're working faster is because, like.

Because it's more straining on them, like you being there. It's not difficult for an employee to always have their Boss watching. Right? P4P should make it where it's based upon how much they want to work. When you're not there, they should still be working hard. Like, if you see that drop in efficiency, just imagine if they were getting paid hourly, it drop another five degrees, you know, like a lot more. So I would not, I wouldn't. I would personally not recommend doing this. Because you're putting. The reason they're working faster is because they're putting themselves under more stress to get the job done. They should get actual little extra compensation. Also, it's gonna be hard to track this because there might be times you go in, spend 30, 40 minutes on the job, they get a phone call or go out and do a nest of it, or you come for a couple hours or you show them a little trick on the weed whacker. It's just gonna be tough to calculate that in simplicity with PvP is the most important thing.

Like, it is incredible to me, less than one. Less than one out of five people that sign up for PVP outside of a destination Will implement it correctly. Less than one out of five.

And other four to five, they, they, they mess it up. They try to get cute with it. They like, okay, we're going to move percentages or we're going to do hourly rates that are different, staggered based upon their tenure. They don't do profit sharing. Oh, they don't do open book management. And I'm like, look, like you have to have P4P open book management and profit sharing. If you don't have all three of those things, it will not work. And if you try to get cute with all sorts of different rates, he's like, why not just have hourly if you're going to have different base pays for every single employee and they can negotiate with you on that. It's like, why would you do that? Just have everyone at the same and use your.

Training bonus and your.

Trainers bonus and your project management bonus to calculate to even out the fact that there are people who are more experienced can get those. So, you know, maybe you beef up your trainer bonus. Maybe you beef up your project management bonus. If you're doing projects, that's totally fine. Maybe you, if you're like, man, my guys on projects just can't make any money. Great. On projects, raise the percentage, but make it like 2 max. Like if you're gonna do 33 for 1 and 40 for, that's fine. But don't start meeting all these ranges. Like, the guy I was talking about, he had like six different percentages between different services. He had different percentages based upon like go up a couple or down if it was like solo versus.

Double. And all of them made sense in and of themselves. Like, of course you can make more money being solo. So like, yes, if you're solo. He was bringing down their, their P4P percentage. Like 2%. Yes, that, that is actually what should probably happen. He was doing a bunch of stuff like that. Base pay would go up as they stay with the company longer, et cetera. It was like, it was so complicated though, I couldn't hardly understand it. And I built the system, let alone employees that are used to like a very 18 an hour. So anyways, Plantation. Should I make my service area smaller? The left Weston is a little farther. I recently added that part. See what we got here.

I don't have a ledger here to see how far this all is. This does not look very far. Oh, you're saying like should you at keep Weston? Honestly, if this is where all of your customers are, I probably wouldn't go over to Weston. Honestly. Man.

It looks like this is going to be a lot of traffic right here. And if you don't have any customers here now, like if I was you, I'd probably just tell command center like hey, I just want to stay inside here. Unless this is like a two minute drive and super easy to access here and there's never traffic in this. But if I'm going to guess that's a lot of traffic, if there's traffic in your area, I bet it's right there. And so that means my only hesitation and if you've been doing marketing and things and you've been getting all your customers here, might be worth just doing here. Or what you can do is just leave it like this. And if you get a few customers here, fine, that's fine. And then as you grow, it'll fill out to being a full.

Route. It doesn't look like it's super far away. So I would probably leave it if I was you. Unless this is like a 10 minute drive from here to over to Weston, I'd probably just leave it.

Nick from Marysville. We are planning on doing two man cruise. That would, that will work fine for mowing. But the challenge comes when we do projects. Most of our projects are less than eight hours. Lots of four or six hour jobs. And if you throw two guys at it, they might an hour to last. They would each make less than they would if they worked eight hours at base pay. Which defeats the point of P4P. Not necessarily, because remember they're going to get the jobs done in half the day. Right. It would make an issue of not making that money even if they are killing. Yes. So you'll have to double up the jobs on those days. Like that's why you're looking at total number of budget hours. Which might mean that they do a couple of those four. They might do a four hour job, a two hour job and then go do mowing routes for the rest of the day. I did the math. I need at least 6.5 budget hours per person in order for it to to even be possible to make more than base pay for an eight hour day. Referring to project only, again that you're assuming that they have to work. They're. They're clocked in for eight hours. They crush budget hours. Enough. Enough. They, they would still make above base pay. Referring to projects only. Okay, so you're saying in eight hour days. Yeah, that makes sense. It's not also not feasible to schedule a separate eight hour projects in a day due to the logistics how would you navigate this? Also, would you recommend having minimums when you get slammed? Like a minimum of 6.5 budget hours to make sure guys always make enough money? I would not overthink this if I was you.

Like if you have less than, less than 14 budget hours in a day for a crew of two that's doing projects only, yeah, they're going to get going to get done early. And so the goal is like this is why you try to standardize your services. So that way you can literally be like, hey, you guys are going to go do this project, you're going to have an extra two or three hours in the day. Do you guys want to come back and have an early day and beat budget hours or do you want to go do those two mowing jobs over there that are pretty big because you have the trailer, you can just throw them all in the back and go do it at the same time. Or you put in the schedule if you're behind and you need them to get the jobs done. But this is why standardization of equipment is important and simple services. So that way they can do the cleanup, have the pushmill in the back of their truck and go knock on a couple lawns and fill their day up. Right. Because otherwise it is sometimes difficult to get like two and three budget hour jobs to kind of pad the rest of their day. So either A, they're going to get budget hours done, completed, they're going to early day, but they're not making up money because they simply didn't work enough. They didn't get a budget hours in their schedule. So I would personally then be trying to route them in with some mowing jobs. And that's again only going to happen if you are doing more simple services. And even if they have a dump trailer, if you're doing pushed mowers and they can throw that on the back of the truck, no problem. Right?

That would be the goal. Obviously I know there's times when that is not possible, but that would be the goal I'd be trying to shoot for.

Man, I thought he was going to get on a master, get a mastermind on a jet. The WI fi wasn't good enough. It was just barely good enough for me to stay on my email and whatsapping throughout the day. Hey Mike, our Google max rate, Google maps optimization at 78% is that good or is there other things that we can tweak? Yeah, so keep in mind that optimization rate is a way for Google to market to you to upgrade and spend more Right. So obviously if you add more keywords, if you add a larger demographic, if you add a wider age range, if you add all these other things, it's going to increase your optimization score that is hitting more people, but you don't want to hit everybody. So I'm not too concerned about optimization scores. I've seen optimization scores. Some of my best campaigns have been 30, 40%. But they were laser focused on who I wanted and they performed really well. So.

Should we drop all clients? No, I wouldn't do that. Like it just. Again, don't, don't take what I said there. Like someone asked me what I would do with my business. Right. For you, if you're a solo operator and you can handle the extra 5, 10 customers are doing poop and you can actually make an extra couple grand a year. Great. Okay. I would just.

Say that in five years when you're trying to get out of the business and.

The people who keep canceling are the ones that you feed the guys, forget to the dog poop up, pick up. That's. That's going to be when it's like, man, I wish I would have gotten to that service.

Yes. Driving that way is traffic. It's an Expressway about 20 to 30 minute drive. Also it's traffic everywhere. One mile could be sometimes a 10 minute drive. Should I talk to you about this? Yeah. So just talk to CC every month we can revise your service area so you could just put in for next month to be updated and they cut that area out if you would like.

Yeah, I would like. My, my, all mine in North Carolina. Two and a half to three mile radiuses. It's all we're doing. If you have 20, 30,000 people, at least in that area, you can easily grow, easily grow a business. Especially if you're only trying to do like 500,000 revenue. Like you don't need five miles, you don't need 10 miles, you don't need a hundred thousand people. So I try to just always remind like we built the first location to a million 1.1 in Blaine. It has 6,000 people. We had way too many services. So if you cut all those out, it was probably like 600,000, $600,000 in revenue though on simple services in a market that had 6,000 people. Right. So just keep that in mind.

Oh wow, man. Marathon Thursday. Yeah. So I guess there was no question about me. Kevin thinks. Let me just recap on that a little bit and then I'll call it a night.

So yeah, I, I was planning to do this back in January, his plane had an issue with the window and it was, they couldn't fly it. So unfortunately got rescheduled for now. So flew out yesterday real fast, hopped on the plane for with him today, went out to Aurora, Colorado, which is not too far from Littleton. I was gonna try to get up there, but it was like non stop. When we were there and looked at real estate. I wasn't really there for the real estate, honestly. I actually stayed outside while they were looking at houses. Most time just worked on my phone. I was there to talk to Kevin and so there were several things I wanted to learn, specifically things that I probably won't even use for a few years. But the same way I'd encourage all of you to come to conferences and learn and grow. Like I need to do the same thing. And so yeah, I'd say that 90% of the day was I was just working on my phone, but it was the 10, 15 minutes here and there that I had with Kevin. There was two other people with me on the flight, but they weren't business people, they were just kind of fans. And so him and I were able to talk a lot. And I've talked to Kevin before a few times. And so it was really, really nice just to be able to talk with someone that like really understands ETFs banking systems. I've been pretty open with the fact like down the road I want to open a bank. So we talked about all the different layers and levels of that. If you want to actually do like the full gig, like get a bank charter, you're looking at you need like $200 million. But then he knows all the lower end stuff like ETFs, credit cards. He's very involved in all of that and was actually going to start a banking app right before the 2022 when the collapse happened. He was going to focus more on the stock side, which I could care less about. But.

It just, it's, it's nice to talk to someone like that. I don't agree with everything that he does in terms of just like online stuff. So I'm probably not going to post that on publicly.

Because people have weird thoughts when I'm with someone like him. I don't agree with everything that he does and things that even today, like I. How he dealt with certain things, I was like, okay, I like this, I don't like this. Like, it's just good for me to see someone at that level operating. But then, for example, like, I learned some very important things about scheduling stuff today and how he does it and just. Just offering someone, being around someone that's operating a different level than you, it just kind of pushes you a little bit. Honestly, that's what it is. Being around someone that's like, completely. They're just operating at a different level. Because I look at, like, what you need to go in jet and fly over there, it's like, man, you don't really need this. Like, that's in my head. Like, I'm running the math per hour, and I'm running, like, what we would pay if you actually just flew everyone commercial and just paid them extra. Like, I was running all this sort of math. Like. Like, you have to think bigger to. To do what he's doing. And so I need to be around someone like that to push myself, because otherwise, like, if you're always the smartest person in the room, there's a problem. And I obviously want to help other people, but, like, I have to become better. And so whether it be through books and podcasts and trying to take nuggets from other people, but being around someone who just operates a different stratosphere than you is very helpful.

It just. It just pushes you to think a little differently. Think about my schedule a little bit differently. I think I could just. From some of the things I picked up on what he was doing today, I could probably save 20 to 30 minutes a day just on some of the things he mentioned. And so I asked him some really, really pointed questions. That was really helpful for me. So, yeah, he was probably 20 to 30 minutes of the whole day that I needed to hear. And I'm good. So it just. It's just difficult sometimes to find people that when I look at them, like, oh, like they're in a different league than me. And that really pushed me to think differently. And in certain areas, he is that. So it's helpful. Yeah, that's why I came down, and I am happy to get back. I'm done traveling. I'm so sick and tired of traveling. This whole winter's been traveling. It's just. I'm ready to be done. So my takeaway in terms of plane. I don't want a private jet as much as I did a few days ago. I've always, like, I want a private jet. I don't think I need it. There's some. There's some inefficiencies, and there's some things I think you could figure out. I think until you're making over a hundred million or you're extreme like 100 million a year or you need to have privacy because you have a public image. Either of those two things. That's when I think I would go private. Because, like, in terms of like the money, it still doesn't make sense from the money side until you're making that much, in my opinion.

So anyways, it's still pretty cool. It's pretty cool to fly in a private plane. Did they make. Yeah, you could absolutely get a paint job in yellow. It would cost about $250,000 to paint a private jet in yellow. I did find that out today. Made sure. I asked.

How did you approach Kevin to get a meeting with him and fly together? As all always looking to see how to approach high net within. So this is paid. This is paid. So this one was paid. I've done other calls with him that weren't paid him. And I just talked. I made a video on him one time. So then he got my cell phone number and we talked then. Then I interviewed him one time on my channel. And when we talked afterwards, which is really helpful.

In terms of this one, I paid for it. Right. So I paid $3,000. I think it's more than that now to come out here. And I probably paid $3,000 for 20 minutes. But it was well worth it. Spirit Airlines. Yes. Let's go. We could buy out Spirit Airlines just to like a gust of nature. The Big Macs now airlines. Horrible. The. The margins are so thin. It's incredible. Anyways, all right. I gonna run a treadmill because I've been sitting all day long. We'll see you guys. Take care. See you to.