Mike Minutes Mastermind 03/07/2023

Hey everyone. Hope you're doing super well. Let's go and get some things kicked off here. Got some announcements. Let me drop the link into the Facebook group. Give me one second here. A couple quick announcements. We got a very Happy birthday to Mr. Lee Park.

We also have a quick reminder I posted in the Facebook group yesterday, but just please abide by the rules of one call per month if you are growth and one call per month if you are solo. You can't book with both, both coaches. You can't book, you know, three calls in one week. You can't do that. The reason is because especially as we in the spring market, there are people that need answers and need help and if they're their time slots are getting booked with people that are booking like three, four calls a week, it gets really bad. So one call per month if you are a growth, one call every other month if you are solo. That's just how it is. And I don't want to have to put in like we could create technology that would like restrict calls. I don't want to do that. I just want to make it where everyone just abides by the rules. So please do that. I appreciate it. Like Ryan Payne was saying, it's a good thing that people are now overbooking and doing too much. The opposite was true a couple years back when no one was booking coaching calls. Like 50, 60% of people were not so very good. Probably have however, can't be booking three or four times a week. And please show up to them when you book them. If you book up 30 minutes, the the coach is slotting out 45 minutes, 50 minutes of their time. And if you don't show up, that means someone else that could have been there is now waiting a 3, 5 a week, days or a week to be able to see the coach because you're taking spots that you are not showing up to. So please, please, please show up. And if you don't show up to them eventually, I'm probably just going to say like, look, you lost your coaching call for the month because it takes their time. They've designated, they get ready for the calls and then someone else that needs the calls now being pushed out. So just please do that. That'd be great. I'd appreciate it. All right, let's go ahead and jump in. Well, where did I go? Where I go? Lol. You closed out my call. What does that mean? Yeah, I'm guessing you just finished your call. Okay, cool. Let's go ahead and present Share Screen. I have Some really cool announcements. I'm horrible, horrible at keeping secrets, by the way.

Horrible at it. But hopefully next couple weeks have some pretty cool announcement. We're trying to push out for Augusta Nation before spring rush. Really looking forward to it. But I'm not going to say anything because can't do that. Oh, he booked out two calls in one week. Naughty, naughty, naughty. Hey, this is public confession. You know, confession is good for the soul. All right, let's go ahead and jump into questions and I'll hop over here.

All right. Derek Duran. Alan Park. Does P4P work with a strictly commercial based company? This could be lawn care or other service based work, but the commercial contract based nature is what I'm asking about. You could have a contract that keeps a crew busy each day and pays them a good wage. Okay. If you have large contracts to fill your schedule, that's there's not enough, there's not extra work for your crew to do if they finish the work faster. It seems like maybe the incentive is just to work, finish work earlier and still make a full day's wage. Yeah, it is. Of course, if they start finishing the work faster, you could try and increase the workload, providing more opportunity for them for income. Just wondering if I'm missing something. Maybe P4P is best in residential lots of jobs type system. There are plenty of commercial companies in and out of the lawn care industry using P4P. You do have to get a little more creative in terms of people finishing jobs sooner. What you'd want to start playing with is the amount of people on the crew. Right? So if they're supposed to be working eight, nine hours, but they're always getting five or six, just reduce the crew count by one. Right? Because typically on commercial they're typically sending two or three people out. You just reduce that, right? If you're getting jobs done that fast, you can reduce the crew count. You can reduce the, like you said, add other jobs at the end of the day. Because if they're only finishing like an hour or two early and it's one off, like they're just, they're going to get the early day like you said, they're going to full days worth of pay for doing less work.

I think the thing is if it's consistently happen when they're two, three hours more that when they start hitting like two to three hours consistently they're off early. That's when typically like they're like, hey, is there more stuff for us to do? And that's where I would try to have the ability, if you're, especially once you're booking out two plus weeks, have those little two, three, four hour jobs kind of like in the back of your head as the scheduler. There might be two or three that you have that are booked out down the road that someone, you could literally just throw on someone's schedule because customers aren't always happy when those get done sooner than later. Especially like little weeding jobs or bush trimming or wrapping up a project. Like if they're on the schedule for two, three weeks down the road, have those in the back of your mind so that you can throw those on someone's schedule. If they are, they randomly get projects done sooner or they get their route just crush it throughout the day. Now if that's happening consistently on a commercial project, that's when you need to reevaluate the amount of people in the crew and potentially like, okay, this is not a one day full job for commercial. I'm going to always have to put them with a couple other mowing jobs or I have to put them with another big commercial job. Now I get, you know, a six out, six budget hour, six hours of their day is spent at this one job. And then I'm going to put another smaller commercial two hour job on the same. Like that is the same route now. So you just. What you're looking for is consistency. If that's happening so consistently with budget hours being just crushed, that's when you start modifying the crew, modifying the route, etc. Or potentially if it's one off, that's when you have a bit of a backlog in your head of those two, three, four hour jobs you can throw in someone's schedule. You know what's funny is when you throw a four hour project on someone's day that finishes at 1:00 clock or 2:00 clock because they crush another job, the momentum is crazy. They'll crush the four hour job in like two or three hours. It always happens. Just because like they're so fired up about the fact that they just made like 30 bucks an hour, 40 bucks an hour on this other project, the momentum carries them to the next job. They are extremely efficient, typically and they always get done sooner. It's just very interesting. Like down the road. I'd love to run some analytics on that sort of thing. Like, okay, if someone finishes a eight hour project in less than six hours and you put something on their schedule, what's the likelihood of them finishing that job at way below budget hours? And it Happens like it just, it's momentum and they just know how much, how they're on a roll. They have the hot hands as they say. Connor from Evansville.

Newburgh and Evansville Augusta are butt up and stacked each other. As we gain more work in our prospective territories, do we need to let the client know that they have been essentially transferred to the other location? They won't. They really won't know until they have a problem trying to get a hold of me or Hugo and then someone else shows up. What's your best opinion on this? Yeah, I'd send a nice email, CC the other territory. If you're trying to like transfer a client over and be like, hey, just so you know, you're in their territory, or we're not servicing your area, but you know, Augusta Lawn Care of Newberg is. They're attached in the email below. Here's their phone number for future contact. We'd love to be of service anytime. Benefit of being part of Augusta is we always have another location that can serve you and that's who's going to be serving you from now on. And not even like ask for any feedback or change. Like from the customer's point of view. Nothing changed. Right. So you could even just treat it as like, hey, it's a transfer between locations. But Augusta Longer is still servicing them. Like their invoices are going to look the same, their estimates are going to look the same. They're calling the same place. So the transfer should be easy. It's like at Anytime Fitness, you just scan your key fob at a different gym, you go to a different gym, you keep scanning there. Eventually your billing switches over. Everything just merges over. They don't, they just send you an email saying, hey, you've been transferred this other club. And so you do have to get that like that from the gym perspective. We have to send those out saying, hey, you've been transferred to our club. We've, we now control your billing. We now control, you know, contact us for any, any help. So the same way as we get more and more Augusta Longer locations, if you want to give someone else, just, just send an email. We've, we love servicing your property. You're now closer to Newberg. We're going to go ahead and transfer you over that. They'll be taking care of you. Here's the phone number and contact is cc'd on this email. That's what I would do either direction.

Caleb from Merritt Island, I want to clarify something. I asked about getting multiple landing pages for Our websites, which you addressed in yesterday's Mastermind. Something that I missed was I was asking if we are able to get duplicates of our homepage. Not the estimate page. No, I've had no look at at all people getting to fill the form on the estimate page. I believe that page is too boneless, bare bones and people will almost always click away to investigate the website before inputting their information.

So we're not going to duplicate the homepage. It creates big issues from an SEO perspective.

And so really what I would really emphasize like you're either going to have to a set up your Google tracking your Google tracking stuff with the code or you're going to have to do your Facebook same thing. Do a Facebook code so that can be tracked. Send that to web@augustalongerservices.com they can put it in there. That's going to be the first way to do it to act. And again like what they're going to do is you're going to put that code on the thank you page. So after they submitted the form there's just so many blockers and privacy stuff right now that like it's we. I don't have a high level of confidence that those are like perfect for you because there's just so many blockers that are keeping the cookies and keeping tracking software from actually working. But that's what I would say it would be your best option. But I would highly recommend everybody, everybody in person asking the customer where you heard about us from and what was the thing that Mass made you contact us is always the best form of answer. Because when we ask a command center, we only ask that when the estimate's been set up. They usually don't know. They're usually on the run, they're on their mobile phone, they're not face to face. When you're face to face someone you just spent 10 minutes walking around their property and talking with them and then you ask them the like where'd you hear about us first you can ask a bunch more and get really in detailed feedback. I know that's not ideal because maybe only one out of three of your customers you're actually meeting in person like that. But that is going to be the best quantity, best qualitative data. I know quantitative, not great. But from a quality standpoint, qualitative, it's the best data you'll ever get because still these tracking things and like I just consistently see, it's like I, I can see that literally 10 forms were submitted and I'm getting three triggers on my Google tracking code and it's like, it's just because people can block that stuff now. Right? So I know it's frustrating, Trust me, it's extremely frustrating when you can't get this sort of level of information. But until there's either a change in the law or there is Facebook and Google figure out ways around these, these privacy things, it's going to be a bit of a pain in the butt.

So yeah, I know, I know what you're saying that like they're going to the estimate page, then they're going to the website and checking things out. I 100% get it. Right. So you're right. Ken from Fenton, Michigan. Well, I would potentially say, Caleb, try this. And that is just trying to give more information in your ad.

More pictures, more videos, more text of like what makes you different. So that when they click on something they're actually submitting a form. And what you might want to do, if this is something you really wanted to use those estimate pages, is instead of using learn more, use get quote for the button. Right? Because then if they click get quote they are, they're kind of ready to submit a form versus learn more. They're probably going to be more investigative around the whole website. So I know it's not a perfect answer, but yeah. Ken from Fenton, Michigan. I just spoke with a temp agency for hiring temporary workers. They charge $28, 95 cents per man hour with a four hour minimum. They pay the workers $17 per hour with the hopes that eventually they would become full time employees and I would take over their employment. They would not get paid PPP while they're in this temp agency's roster. Temp, that's not a bad deal. The temp agency takes how long do they have to work on for a four hour minimum? Got it. The temp agency takes care of everything from taxes to workers comp, but even background checks and drug screening. All I need to do is to tell the agency how many people I need and when I need them and for how long. I wouldn't owe the agency any money until after the work was performed. And I would get an invoice in the mail the following Friday. I would simply write them a check and mail it in. What do you think of this idea? Should I use this agency or would it be better to just hire people my own? And that's a great thing I've never actually done. I've heard of people doing hiring temp workers, but the fact that you only have a four hour minimum. You're basically only paying like an extra 50 bucks on top of their wages for four hours and you can vet them and then if you have a higher base pay than 17 bucks an hour, the employee's gonna want to stay with you if they're good. Right. So I would definitely try this. What you're going to find is that out of five people that the temp agency sends you, two of them show up to work and one of them leaves within an hour because of usually drug related issues. So you just have to be really used to going through a lot of people. That's not something we can do at a larger company, Larger company size. Because if you have that much churn and burn, you're just going to make all your top performers extremely unhappy and mad. It's going to burn the culture. It's not going to be good for your customers. But if you are a solo operator, this might be an option. And this would be what I would probably do personally is you do something like this with a massive mulch install or a massive weeding job where you know, you can get extremely low skill, put them on a task and then get a, a pulse on their work ethic over the course of a day. And I guarantee you out of five, you'll be very lucky to have a good worker that will complete the first day. Like show up, complete the whole day, and then if you do that a couple times, maybe you get a good employee. Not a bad idea. So I would test this. Probably only if you were the. So a solo operator that was looking for your first employee and you had eyes on this person all day long. Because you got to remember in this labor market, if someone's going to a temp agency, there might be a reason why. Right. Because there's a lot of jobs available.

So just keep that in mind.

Garrett from Glendale. Is this typical for Facebook lead form ads? It says status, not delivering. Do I need to change something? Increase ad spend, currently $5 a day or just be patient. See attached. All right, let's see. Attached.

Not delivering.

So it looks like it got started.

Because you, you reached 608 people and then it stopped delivering. So there's a reason why.

See what your other picture says here.

Yeah, so it started and it stopped, but it's not giving you an error message, which is funky.

Yeah, I don't. Because usually the error message as to why it's.

Why it's not delivering, it should be somewhere on your campaign. Like I'm saying, why stop delivering? Sometimes it is just your.

Your targeting is too detailed and so the size of people you're targeting is so small it can't show it to anybody and it'll just can it. You could try updating your budget, but that should not be the problem. It's typically you've restricted the targeting so much that it can't show it to enough people and so it just cans it.

So I would take a look at that, try widening it, redoing it again. I'd make a new one with wider targeting, like maybe take out the age requirement or something like that. I typically see this happening when someone's targeting like trying to do like a half mile radius and cutting a bunch of neighborhoods out and targeting like certain interests and like there's literally only so many people that are using Facebook in that area that are doing those things. So that's what I typically see. I definitely try to widen out your target a bit and then just do a new ad. If it happens again, you might need to contact Facebook. But it the positive thing, it did start like it initiated and started showing it to people. So there's a reason why it was taken down. Jason from Knoxville, Tennessee I recently chart changed our Google Ads territory to closer resemble Augusta territory and have also upped our daily spend from 50 to 100 per day. However, our call volume has dropped off dramatically in the last few days. Google is recommending that I up my butt. Don't Google recommends you to up your budget. That's like saying I recommend that you order dessert, three appetizers and two entrees for your dinner tonight. And I'm your waiter of course I want you to do that right. So just keep that in mind. Should I do this or change something else? The weather has been nice here in spring is definitely sprung. Also I've noticed that Augusta Knoxville is not showing up in the Google Ads section on or the business section. A little concerned about this as I'm pretty sure we are were showing up in both these sections just a week or so ago. I've emailed Google but who knows when I'll get a call or response. Okay, so two things. Number one, redo your ad because if you were already in there and now it's not showing up, that's weird. Very strange.

I would not spend more than $100 per day. You're gonna start getting into high levels of waste. So I would just wait on that. But I would redo your ad. Second thing, the announcements I have coming up hopefully at the next week have a lot to do with this and it'll be very good thing. So.

Yeah, not gonna say anymore. Number seven, Abraham Moscaro. Hi Mike, wondering what your thoughts are on a small engine repair shop for sale that can serve as our shop space as well. It's been on sale for about five months already. My wife would be running that business. I would probably talk to Ryan Payne about running a small engine repair shop before you jump into that. And it's a completely different business. And like, margins are tough.

Yeah. So just, just keep that in mind because Ryan bought out his partner last year for their dealership. And when you have it, when you're a dealer, there's things like you gotta change over software, you gotta hold certain inventory, there's certain requirements, etc. So just know that you'd be buying this, you're buying a business. Right. Ideally you could somehow buy this or like get this place as a shop space without having to go into the engine repair side of things. Because that's a totally different business. Right. Totally different. And so I would, if I was you, I'd spend 10 minutes on the phone, if possible, with Ryan Payne, if he's able to do that. Just to give you potentially some highlights of looking at the financials, potentially this, the business is and giving you some potential feedback on whether or not it's a good deal. Kyle Tarvin, what topics are discussed during the Thursday team meetings? We are going to start doing these. Yeah. So the optional ones are 20 minutes before the team meeting. That is for everybody. And we talk about everything from personal finance, mortgages, what's going on, the stock market, how they can improve their credit score.

I try to get them to talk more than I used to and share their experiences. Like they'll share tips about like what kind of credit cards they use and how they build their credit and what banking, bank apps they use or budgeting. We talk about budgeting. So just try to make it like, personally I just try to make it like as helpful as possible for them. Just keep in mind a lot of them are entry level. They're just getting started. They're trying to get their first. There's a first couple jobs and so talking about super in depth things, you're going to lose them pretty quickly. So you just got to make sure it's like a good topic that is topical and that is that they can relate to and hopefully helpful. And then also that's where I share like the financials because not everyone even cares. So it's like, look, if you want to come to the Optional team meeting. I'll go over the financials in detail. We print them off. Everyone can see the financials obviously on the wall. But in the meeting that's optional. Like we go through each line item, go over things that are higher or lower compared to the average, etc.

Connor For Huntersville, do you know. Sorry, I just thought of something. I had to put a note down. Give me a second.

All right.

Do you know how many 5 star reviews Augusta has combined? I was wondering if it'd be worth using on marketing something like trust a company with more than 5,000. 5. 5. 5 out of 5 reviews across America. I don't think this would be impactful until we had like a million or maybe 100,000. Right. When it becomes such a massive number just blows people's socks off. That's probably where I would start figuring in. We were actually considering doing a schema on everyone's websites underneath that has the number of stars and trying to combine all the locations but you can't really do that across Google accounts. The reason why, like companies like Yelp.

Lawnstarter does it a lot. Another one I'm trying to remember, I forget the other one. They have like four or five thousand five star reviews in their schema is because they're one company and they have all their customers that they kind of do third party connection with a contractor for. They all leave reviews for one Google account. And so that's why they get like four or five, 6,000 reviews under one.

So for now at least we can't combine locations on the actual schema. But definitely on the road, something like this would be helpful. I would probably lean more into kind of what McDonald's is, which was like 1 billion, 1 billion burgers served or whatever it was. 99 billion burgers served. I'd probably lean into like when we hit a million customers served and we were able to run the data of like, okay, if we take all the databases of all of the, the franchisees, you know, we easily get a million I would say within the next year or two. And then that's when it's like, okay, we've, we've served a million customers. Served. That sounds pretty cool, right? So that would be the goal is having blows people's socks off is almost unrelatable compared to everyone else. Connor from Evansville. So I'm taking some notes from Jason Evangelista and resending old mowing quotes to cuss we're doing in Bellingham. Let's go. 220 customers are going to get Their estimate again from last year, resending old mowing quotes to customers again this year with updated pricing, which is a tad lower for us or at least some structured now that I have a year under my belt. Okay, great. So you like your pricing matrix and everything is dialing. Got it. Can I just use the same template? No, no, no, no. This is what we were talking about yesterday. I just use the same template and say, last year we sent you a price for lawn care. We have revised your pricing and turns out your price is cheaper this year. Or do I need to redo anything and say it's complimentary? So, okay, so you're right. You need to modify the email. That's the bottom line. Don't just send out the email as is, because the email as is. Like, here's the quote you requested. They didn't request a quote. Right. So I would recommend is send them an email that's very much tailored to them. And if you're only doing like 30 or 40 of these or 50, I would do them one by one. Honestly, we're doing 220@ Bellingham shop. I'll give you the data. In terms of how many people accept. What I would recommend, if you're doing a lot like a bulk email, is go along the lines of, I wouldn't say it turns out it's cheaper this year. I wouldn't do that unless you have a reasoning for it. Like, last year was crazy inflation. This year we've been able to, like, maybe you can pull that off and make sense of it. But if you say it's cheaper after the fact, like, it comes across like you're desperate almost for the sale and you, like, are kind of being scammy with it. Like, hey, now you're $10 off after you just checked out. Right. Kind of thing. Um, it's like when people give you a coupon for your next purchase, it's like, seriously, I just. Can I just get. Go back in the line and buy something else now? So the top kind of feels. I would say I would probably take the positioning of more along the lines of, we are booking up. We know that last year requested service. Before we get crazy busy this spring rush, we want to give you the opportunity, because we've already done business with you, to accept the quote based upon last year's pricing, or we've updated the pricing. I think you might like it. You. I think you might like the difference. Something like that. Cute. But keep it more a matter of, like, we're booking up and use the Scarcity of. We're giving them the, you know, first option to be able to schedule service with us before we get really busy.

All right.

What else we got? Plantation. Last one. My client recently laid sod in his backyard. I told him in certain spots, the grass will not grow because it's in shady areas. He also placed the grass so close to a bench and tree. Now the grass is starting to die. And I know he will blame me again, as he did before. What should I do? If there's things like this, you want to get them in writing. So I would personally put this on the estimate quote. Right. This is the reason why you copy and paste your estimate notes from your template, and then you add verbiage in there. And one of those things is, client was warned about shady areas and lack of growth potentially happening. That's all you need put in the estimate. So when they accept it's in writing that they have acknowledged that risk. Right. We got pictures. Oh, we got pictures. Let's go.

Okay, so this is the tree, I'm assuming. Okay. What else we got here? We got. Okay. In Florida, if this is considered dying, this is pretty good. Okay, so you're saying you think it's going to die. The fact is, though, like, it looks like it's got some pretty good morning sun in here. I would think it's going to be okay. But this is just my Pacific Northwest person talking.

If it's looking good right now, this is a great time to still address this with a customer. Like, hey, just so you know, I did warn you, this potentially down the road might not look good like we talked about. Do that now when it's looking good. Because in my mind, this looks pretty good. If you think, okay, this is gonna look bad in two or three months, address it now. Make sure you tell the customer, like, hey, I know we talked about before, but down the road, this might not look great because it's shaded. Just heads up, they'll be, oh, no problem. Like, that's okay because it looks good now. So.

That all we got? That's all we got. All right, let me delete all those out. Boom. And see, we got some other questions in here.

I've been not good luck with temp workers. However, starting at $17 per hour might be better because our staffing agency only paid $12 per hour. So maybe you have better luck at 17. Cool. I'm probably doing 100 to 150 on send. It's cheaper only because we honed in, but I understand where the desperation play Yeah, I would probably use scarcity. I probably use scarcity. And then if you are actually lowering prices on a bunch of them, just say, like in brackets, you might like the price better this year. Winky face, something like that. I wouldn't say lowering prices. I wouldn't say it's cheaper, anything like that. I just say you might like the prices better this year. Ah, they got better. Or something like that, just to get them to click into the estimate. But I would use scarcity as the big thing. Okay, it's going to get crazy busy. We're going to fill up. We know you. Last year, you needed service. In case you need it again this year, we want to give you the first opportunity to get on the schedule. All right, guys, have a fantastic day.