Mike Minutes Mastermind 03/09/2023

Hello, Guess nation.

Happy Thursday. Make sure I'm seeing this correctly. Or if I didn't. Microphone. I'll go. There we go. Much better. Fantastic. All right, let me just drop this into the Facebook group. My goodness. Past 24 hours been just thrilling.

See here. Copy this.

There. All right. Yeah. I feel like I have been doing software garbage for the past 24 hours. It's been absolutely hitting the headache. We got service autopilot not firing off automations and sending out emails correctly. We got Zooper dealing with typical issues. Just got off the phone with Anon, the CEO and then Copilot yesterday. We had a bunch of bugs when we. Unfortunately, I'll get them all fixed, but it's very, very fun. All right, let me jump in. I talked to Anon just for those of you who are using Zooper, and one thing he did say was.

Interesting. Slash. I knew slash. Good to hear. And that was that he just basically said that they are not a CRM and they've been trying to be a CRM for us when they're really field service management. And a lot of our issues stem around the fact that that is not their expertise and that is they don't focus on doing CRM stuff. So.

All of that to say they are going to be doing a webinar and trying to get more feedback from those of you who are using Zooper and trying to reduce some of the friction and issues that we're having, which is dispatch and routing. And overall, though, like, they're not really built for, like, creating automations custom like we want and need. And so what they promised us was that they would be able to do that, and they just haven't delivered on that as much as we would like.

So, yeah, I just talked to Anand Anand about that. They're gonna be doing a webinar, so Siraj will probably set that up for those of you who are using Zooper. So definitely feel free to attend that. Ask questions, press on, things that you want.

Yeah. So let me just drop this in the Facebook group. Sorry.

So that is that. All right. I had another announcement, but I need to run it by Liz. So give me till tomorrow on that one.

And that's it for cut for announcements. Let's jump right into questions. Let me pull up the.

Questions. All I can say is the amount of headache I've been having over Shiversaw, Pilot and Zooper. I need to have Copilot so I can have all the heat the same way I do now. But I get paid for the heat. Right now. I Don't get paid for the heat. I don't get paid for dealing with all these issues.

So, anyways, yesterday we had. We had six really bad bugs with copilot. Not fun at all, but we got them all scored immediately. This bug with service Autopilot's Automations has. Has been like a week and a half and it just boggles my brain. It hurts my brain. It boggles my brain. It scrambles my brain and. Yeah, okay, let's just jump right in.

Present Share screen. All right, how many we got? 5. Not bad. That's not bad. Let's go. All right, Landon from Tallahassee, Florida. This is a question about performing the actual work. This is my first spring and I ran into a problem with budgeted hours. I'm March, live oak leave just started falling and the grass is also growing. It is pretty much expected. Is it? It is pretty much expected that when you are maintaining a lawn here, that leaves are clear when you leave. However, I can't blow them all up. The leaves, the mo edge wheat eat and blow again in budget time. How do I keep customer service high while also hitting budget hours right now? Um, I would recommend sending an email to all of your customers saying if they want leaf service, they need to sign up for something additional during these months. Say, hey, during March and April, there's a lot of leaves in the ground. You currently have mowing service. Mow, edge and blow. If you would like us to also remove the leaves on the lawn, you need to let us know because otherwise we're going to blow off the yard and put the leaves into the flower beds. Or if there's a big pile of them, like, we're not. We're going to mow around them if you don't have leaf service. So this would be a great way to upsell it. You can can pitch this in a way that's positive for the customer and tack on extra 10, 20 minutes that you need to get the leaves done. And it's only for a given period of time. The same is true for the people that do it in a lot of their leaves happen in October, November, December, they gotta do the same thing. And that is either A, you're going to mow what you can because that's what they're paying for, or B, you're going to upsell them into leaf service. And if they don't accept that, then they know what they're getting, and that is they're not getting leaf cleanup in addition to mowing because it can double the amount of time it takes sometimes if you're trying to do that and amount of debris.

Hey Mike, got a one click on Monday sent out. Sent out a one click on Monday got around 90 clicks. Spoke to Chris at Command center yesterday to see why I've only had a few dispatched to me or estimate sent out. For some reason close to 80 people who click the track link did not appear on CC's end. Yeah, this is service off.

Sorry, I. Yeah I'm sorry. It's just. It's service all applies bug.

Man. I'm just trying to think how to do this. I would say like I know it sounds horrible Joe, I apologize. I know you're going to have to go through a thousand people but I would go through the thousand people, spend an afternoon doing that and get the people who clicked on it. If you can though, go to the if this if you see who it is already in the clicking oh your notifications notifications screenshot that and if you want command center to send out dispatch a bunch of estimates for you and stuff or create them or however you're doing this, you could then submit them to the screenshot like hey these are all the customers that clicked on the tracking link. Please get them an estimate for this specific service or set them up for service or whatever it is. Yeah, this is. This is boggling my brain right now. I hate it. I'm a fault. I'm sorry, I don't know what to do but service all has been dealing with this for a week and a half now and their automations are infrequent.

So sorry like at least with copilot I can tell you what's going on. I can tell you what we're trying to fix, who's working on the problem and exactly what's going on the background. Right now the black box of service autopilot is making me extremely unhappy because that for example I know specifically 90 customers clicking let's just say that's 40 or 50 accepted estimates. Like.

You'Ll be getting to set your second truck like next week.

Sorry. All right, trail Boone's crate. Here we go. Lately our Google local services is not showing up when I search long here in my town it's been working fine through the winter even got leads to winter here and there but lately it seems intermittent. Right now recently it does not show at all. I've checked and everything seems fine to be in the settings profile and budget. Any ideas?

What I would be asking is twofold. One is Google local services showing up at all? Or two is it showing up and its other competitors. So if other competitors are getting the market, that could be why you're not showing up all the time. If it's not there at all.

It could be Google's testing stuff. If there is Google local services and you're not showing up and there's other competitors, you might want to call Google service and just be like, hey, this is what I'm noticing. Is there anything on the back end that you guys can see that why I'm not showing up anymore? That might be an option too. Unfortunately in Google services you can't see how many impressions you have. You can only see how many leads you have. So you can't really see if it's actually being shown to other people and potentially if your account has been flagged as an admin and like it's not showing to you or something weird. Unfortunately you just can't see if you're getting impressions. So I would recommend trying some other different devices than your own and seeing if the same is true. And my thing, the thing that you should be worried more about is if it's not, if it's showing other competitors and not you all the time. Right. Keep in mind it's going to spring. So some people probably turn their ads back on but it shouldn't be where it's 100% of the time and like you get no leads for say three or four weeks. That's when I'd be raising red flags and giving them a call and just be like hey, like what's up? And just see what the response is. I honestly guarantee you they're going to be like oh we're testing, we'll get this ticket submitted. Like you're not going to get a really good answer honestly. But you just got to do what you can on the on your end which is make sure all your forms are filled out, budget is maximized, try other devices to see if you can access it that way. But I would definitely give it three or four weeks of like no leads before I'd be too worried about it.

Good morning Mike. Oh there's Teresa Namp, Idaho. Good morning Mike. We had, we have an area that already had decent route density. Wondering if we should do should use door hangers and every door direct mail to focus growth in the area. There are two high end neighborhoods that we could target specifically. Do you have any rough data on conversion rates for door hangers and every door direct mail? Also what do you recommend for the, for the timing of these efforts we are starting to mow next week. But it has been a late winter and many people do not start mowing their lawns until sometime in April. Yes, like the, the heat is going to be from now until probably the second or third week of April. That's going to be your go time. Right. Anytime during that time. Door hangers are gonna be great. Every door to our email gonna be great. Literally. You usually have four to eight weeks where you have like the best opportunity.

In terms of conversion rates. It's crazy correlated to weather.

If it's been wet and really nice weather for three days on the first week of April and you send it out on that third day, you're gonna probably get maybe a half a percent or three quarters of percent response rate. You might get a point 1% response rate if it is on a bad weather day. And difference between 0.1% and 0.75% is 700%. So it's a big difference. And so, you know, that's the difference in getting, you know, seven leads out of 100 versus one out of, sorry, seven out of a thousand versus one out of a thousand. And both of those numbers I've seen, I've also seen 20 out of a thousand, like a 2% response rate. I've never seen more than 2% response rate, to be perfectly honest with you. If you're just putting out door hangers in every door, direct mail. But I would say Anything above a 0.5% response rate is actually really good. So I mean, every 'Thousand you're getting two leads, you're paying, you know, 50 cents a pop, 30 cents a pop for printing and distribution, 30 times a thousand, that's $300. And you'd be getting.

Five leads. Let's call it three customers. That's $100 customer acquisition cost. Right. So three new customers, you paid 300 bucks for the, for printing everything and sending it out. That, that's kind of a. Anything above that, like better than that. I think it's pretty good. And I made that math on the fly and guessed. Let's go.

Number five. Chad from Valparaiso, Indiana. How would you recommend scheduling estimates when you are an employee in the truck? Should I have the employee with me and pay them for their time and expedite the estimate or delay the estimates and do them after I drop off the employee? I would personally just wait. I would personally just be like, okay, I'm going to work from 7 to 3 with the employee and then from 3 to 6, I'm going to knock out my, my estimates. I would do that. The only reason I would not do that is if you are trying to scale massively fast. Like I'm talking, you're starting at zero. You're going to get three or four trucks and you're trying to get 20 estimates a day via marketing. Right. That's the only reason why I would say like jump right into your estimates right away and doing it basically full time. But otherwise I would much rather at the end of the day you knock all the estimates out. And that way if it's an end of the day and it's a drive by, you might knock it out on the way back from your mowing route. That's the only time I would ever have an employee with me is if I'm doing a drive by and it's on my mowing route going back to the shop instead of driving back out there at the end of the day. That's the only time I would do it. I did not want to be paying for them to sit in the truck for 45 minutes while I talked to Mr. Jones.

Seabrook, Texas Solo model so things are really ramping up this spring. Going to make. I'm going to make mandatory weekly mowings. I know I'm going to lose some customers, but that's okay. You probably will lose less than you think. Just FYI. I'm not sure if there if it's just this week, but that's been super hectic with a huge project and two other cleanups added to the week. Welcome to spring rush, baby. Get ready for a hectic next four months. But it really feels like if I had an employee would really help. Although I know that's just because I'm really busy this week and I don't know about the next week or the week after. At what point should I look into hiring some someone to help me and what do I need to do as a business owner to ensure a proper hiring system? Payroll? I think you meant P4P et cetera. Okay, great. Let me answer this question with certainty. You need an employee. If you're feeling that right now, this early in the spring rush, you hire somebody 100% look back at the second stage of growth because that's where you're at. And it says if it's late in the season and you're booking yourself out more than two weeks, you might not want to raise, you might not want to hire someone and you might just want to raise prices to quell demand early in the spring rush like we are now. If you have this Type of demand. I guarantee you in a month you'll be busier. Like, there's no questions, there's no doubts. I have no question whatsoever that you will be busier in one month. Guarantee it. So if you're feeling the pain now, you should absolutely be hiring somebody. In terms of this part at the bottom, this is a coaching call. They'll walk you through this. They'll make sure that you have the right documents from the dashboard, including the questions to ask at the interview, the process of getting the interviewees there, in terms of texting them, following up with them, the onboarding process, all of that. So if it's been a while since you started, like, it's been six or eight months since training, I understand this is, you know, forgotten on your coaching call. That's when like, hey, I'm going to be hiring somebody. How do I do this? Like, give me the system. Can you point me in the right direction? What to download that. There's a checklist on the dashboard that literally walks you through before hiring, during the interview process, and then what to get them what documents they need to sign to get them onboarded. So.

All right, what else we got here?

I sent a spreadsheet to CC with all who click. Great. Joe, if you did that, you'll need to make sure you give them context. All right, that, hey, this is. This is from the one. Because otherwise they're gonna be like, what is this going on? So just I'm assuming you sent this to Estimate at Augusta Long or project at Augusta Projects 1. But just make sure you give them context. So what are solo operators expected to do since Zoover essentially gave up? They haven't necessarily given up. They are trying to do what we asked them to do. They've just admitted that that's not their forte and that they stepped into a game that they are not strong. And that's what they admitted. Basically. They're not essentially giving up. They are trying to service everybody. And I are going to be making a webinar. Siraj will probably post in the Facebook group for all the super users. So I would recommend everyone get on there and tell them what you think.

I have calls with their executive team every single week. I had a call with the CEO this morning.

But there's nothing like users telling them what's going on. So.

Let'S go. Just heard back from Danny. Let's go. Dude, that was fast. Let's go. Cool. All right, everyone. I hope a fantastic day. I hope you have a better day than I did yesterday. Welcome to spring rush. So congrats to everyone that's getting started. Lean into it. Like it said over higher. I guarantee you, if you're feeling any sort of pressure right now in terms of like, oh, man, there's a lot of work, like, wow, we're really ramping up. Please hire people. All right? I have yet to see anyone hire someone in the middle of spring rush. Be like, oh, man, like, what am I going to do with them? Like, there's. There's not enough work. So please go hire people. Go get the reps in. Even if you're not ready to hire someone, go interview a bunch of people. Get in the process of knowing how to ask the questions and filter through candidates and learn how to use indeed and make sure that you can literally use indeed mark people as not you don't want them and not get charged for it as long as you stay on top of it really well. Right? All right, let's go crush it, folks. Have a great day. We'll see you tomorrow. Take care.