Mike Minutes Mastermind 03/10/2023

Hello, Augusta Nation. Hope you're all doing well. Let's go and get started. Just drop this link into Facebook real quick. Couple quick things to go over before we jump into questions.

Mike. Minutes.

Cool. One thing, I was in a meeting yesterday with Liz. She mentioned something I thought was a good thing to say.

In terms of going to Spring Rush. And that is one second. I just paste this in here.

She had said, tweak, don't revamp. So going into Spring Rush, you know, over the winter is the time to revamp things, add new systems, make big changes. You know, maybe you change the equipment providers, you change where your shop was at. You might change CRMs, you might change payroll softwares. But now that you enter Spring Rush, you do need to focus on doing the work.

And any changes need to be tweaks, slight modifications instead of revamping things. Liz was talking about Command center. And that's really been the methodology that we're trying to use this year is like, we really focused a bunch on system improving and breaking a bunch of stuff during the winter, redoing the departments and all the rest of it. But we're not going to be revamping things, going to Spring Rush. This is the time to get work done. This is the time to be efficient and spend the vast majority of our time doing the work instead of trying to improve the work. And so for everyone, I think there's a good point that is tweak, don't try to revamp. Especially if you're growing really quickly. It can be very tempting. Like, I'm going to institute this new way of doing this. So, like, I'm going to have the guys do this totally differently. Don't recommend doing that during Spring Rush. Wait until summer, wait until next winter. Those things should have already been done. And.

Focus now on the implementation of those things that you've known you should be doing all winter. All right, let's go ahead. Oh, there's one more thing. Kevin Fairburn in the Franchise Advisory Council had brought up the possibility of Command center being able to do responses to Google reviews automatically. And we don't want to do it automatically. If you want Command center to respond to a review for you, just let them know via Connect Team, totally fine. Especially if they're negative and you're like, hey, I'm going to get emotional. I'm going to say something. I shouldn't. Let Command center handle it. They know what to do. They have the templates, et cetera. What we're not going to do is just automatically do them for you without asking because it can lead to just too much error. Now, if you've gotten, you've been with command center center a lot and someone knows your account, they know you really well, they might say, hey, I can take this one off your plate and just get it done for you. But we're not going to make it a process where you automatically do every single one. Because two things. Number one, if it's a good review, I highly recommend everyone use this as an SEO opportunity. Don't just say, thank you, Mr. Jones. Say, thank you, Mr. Jones. It was great. It was a pleasure doing your lawn care, landscaping and property cleanup at your house last week. Those, those things we are seeing. Google is leaning on a bunch in terms of SEO, because if you can, if they, if Google see, hey, those are the keywords in the reviews and the responses to the reviews. That's very good. Okay. So I highly recommend, don't just have A thank you, Mr. Jones. It was great working for you. Say, thank you, Mr. Jones. It was a pleasure doing your X, Y and Z services at your property in Ferndale last week. Whatever this like, I would recommend using this as an SEO opportunity. Okay. If it's a bad review, I would, I would focus on making sure there's context. Right. And that's the part that we don't have at Command center is all the little conversations and them telling your crew weird stuff on the property. We don't know any of that. And so we don't want to be the ones to make that response that is so critical because it's gonna be the one that's read by most people. We do want you as the owner to deal with that. I would recommend put a reminder in your app on your phone once a month to go through your reviews and respond to them thoughtfully. Right. It's gonna take you five to 10 minutes. You're gonna copy and paste from the templates in the dashboard if it's bad reviews and maybe add some context about other things that happened. There's plenty of screenshots throughout the Facebook page of really good responses that people have got from really bad, angry, angry customers. Like Ryan Payne just had one from a year ago. Someone came back and said all these negative things. His response was much more detailed of what exactly happened. Because you're trying to refute versus just laying it down. Laying down, like, please contact us or whatever. Like, there's certain ways of handling each one. Right? So the templates are great and then adding context if needs be. And Ryan's thing that he had ran it by us and said like, look, move the one part about, you know, if there was confusion, please contact us. Don't put at the end, put at the beginning because that's what people are going to read. So get the positive out of the way and then actually dig into the details of what exactly happened to the job. So Command center can help. But we're not going to make it where it's a process of automatically responding to your reviews because I want if they're good for you to add a lot of context. It's an SEO opportunity. If it's bad, you'll probably.

I don't have enough confidence that we can 99% of the time answer correctly. And that's my synthesis for Command Center. If we can't do it 99% of the time correctly, we can't do it. And so I just want you all to answer questions if needs be.

All right, let's see here. Questions.

Share.

Right.

This is coming from Anne with ALC of Marietta. Oh by the way, and the other day I saw the song you wrote down at training. Listen to it. It was great. I need the song. Let's go. Hunter and I are doing this as a team now. In his former longer business he never took an actual draw from profits and he didn't pay himself. We do not want to perpetuate that habit and need your insight since he will be working, he'll be in the field working from the get go and I am working on the back end writing up and sending out estimates, Learning Q invoicing, etc. Using CC as little as possible at this point. I have a few related questions. Do we set up ourselves as W2 employees now and do the onboarding process with ourselves? What are your thoughts on rate? We should pay ourselves with Hunter hourly at the rate at at the rate we would start paying a new hire more or less. With me, I do stick to a very modest hours intention to rate to have a raise when we hit a certain profit point. How do I how do how I do an hourly rate, say a minimum wage or how do I pay myself more? Any advice on how to tackle this would be helpful. We do want to stay trim as much as we can and keep money in the business. But we also want to adopt healthy habits from the get go so that this train starts moving faster and we make and we are making decent money that we aren't struggling to pull the trigger to pay ourselves. We want honest numbers of what it takes to run this gig and Feeling like this component is certainly part of what it costs to do business. Thoughts? Thanks. Yeah, so this would be my recommendation. I know everyone has a different opinion on this. I would not do W2 employees in the first year because.

You'Re, you're likely an LLC and you probably don't have to pay yourself as an employee like you would if you were an S corp. And you're likely this first year not going to make a ton of profits because you have all the trucks to write off all the equipment that you just purchased and you're going to be spending money on marketing and hiring, et cetera. So if you plan to have a really profitable year this year and you're going to do 1120s and, and files A as an S corp, then you do need to pay yourself W2. You must. Right? You can't reverse that. So if you, if you plan to be very profitable, I would say that knowing that this is your first year, I don't see that you're going to make like $150,000 in profit this year. Likely not. And so you likely are running yourself with an LLC and you're probably going to be paying, you know, tax on whatever, you know, as the pass through entity. And so I would personally do a.

Pay yourself based upon with Hunter out the field, pay him on P4P and then pay yourself, like you said, a modest amount internally and then raise that as it gets busier and busier over time. And.

I would pay yourself W2 probably next year, but for now just do owner distributions. That's fine, but do it based upon like moving money into your personal account based upon P4P and then some sort of modest salary for yourself in terms of the office side and move that number up as you get busier because eventually what's going happen is you're going to want to hand that stuff off to command center. And when you're like, okay, I'm now paying myself, you know, two, three, $4,000 a month because it's starting to become four, five, six hours a day, that's when it's going to be a much easier transition to hand it off command center because you're paying that to yourself already. And then you can hand stuff off. Right? So that'd be my recommendation. But I would only do the W2 stuff. If you're planning on having to file as a 1120s. Talk to your CPA. There you go. Kyle Tarvin, how do you handle rain during the day of mowing? Do you push your crews to mow all yards and not skip any even if they are wet or soggy. I want to give the crews the ability to skip, as is the customers responsible to call beforehand if they don't want us to mow. In my mind, we need to mow everything and bill for all even if they are wet. That's what we do. We don't ever cancel. If it starts raining in the middle day, we just finish the route and we keep going. I know in some areas it's a torrential downpour. You're going to just have to stop and then I don't think any customers are going to blame you. But I also find a lot of Those markets it's 15 to 30 minutes of torrential downpour and then you can kind of get back into it. So it's just, I know it's tough to like call. Either call the day or do you just say, hey, let's just work through this. I think looking at a weather pattern is really helpful to see, okay, this is like a short temporary rain that's moving through or is this going to be here for the next three days? Right, but we personally just keep mowing if it's a little wet and soggy. The guys know that they might have to weed whack some soft spots.

Eric from Largo, Florida, since Lonnie's left Gus, is there someone else in the organization we should include on issues? I would take it directly to Super. Honestly, that's the best way to do it because that's what we were basically doing before is we just forwarded along to them. I want them to see the tickets, I want them to see the problems, I want them to see the issues. So I would just do it directly. Support at Zooper and if you want to include Siraj in there, his emails on the super page, that'd be great. But that every Thursday I have a meeting with them. So I usually am going through those with them. But just submit those tickets directly to them and then I'll go through them with them on Thursday. There's really no reason to have an intermediary. Honestly, I want them to see the Raw. So, Kyle, I'm looking at my Google Ads and they've been up for multiple weeks but the picture is saying pending underperformance. This is something to be concerned about. If it's been weeks, yes, I would redo them.

I'm assuming all of them are pending and not just these few. Which if that's the case, I would just redo your ad. If it's not. If it's if it's taking longer than a week, that's when I'd say like you should redo them. Why that's happening I haven't the slightest idea.

So.

By Monday we should have the update about.

A potential solution for a lot of these problems too.

Eric from Largo for your locations, do you always maintain the 50 increase from weekly to bi weekly pricing? If not, what factors come into play? We always do 100 across the board. 2. When raising prices, do you always raise the weekly and bi week rates equivalently? I asked because as I gear up to make some price increases and reflecting my past permanent hour rates achieve, there are weekly rates that need raising. While bi weekly prices is good or great, bi weekly for the most of the year outside of our rainy summer months is pretty common in Florida. I am considering raising only raising weeklies with smaller raises to bi weeklies if any at all.

Completely up to you.

For the sake of consistency, we've just always done 50 more bi weekly and even if we raise prices, we do the same thing. Just for the sake of simplicity. It's very easy for us to always know what the prices are going to be. It's easy for us to be able to know if a customer comes and walks and says hey, I'm charged 50 and I want to go to buy with what it costs. We know what it is. We just have for the sake of simplicity. So you can absolutely, you know, move weekly up and not or bi weekly if that's something you want to do. If you feel like you don't want to, you don't want to, you're going to lose customers if you have too high of a bi weekly. You could do that. I would just personally raise them both during a time when everyone's on weekly and they're not even going to see the bi weekly. They're not even going to think about it because they're just thinking about okay, I do weekly for the next three months. Okay, it went up $5. They don't notice. They don't even think about the fact that their BI Weekly went 750. Dustin from Champaign. We are getting ready to start running ads heavy for both locations. Should I wait till after the announcement coming or make them this afternoon? Tonight? Go ahead and make them this. The announcement isn't going to, you know, mess you up or change anything massive like that, but it'll improve things and give you an option. So just, just wait till Monday, Tuesday I should have it done and I will roll that out if I, I'm hoping I can do this this weekend and finalize everything, but I would just go and run your ads. Is never a bad thing to get in the habit. And the practice of running more ads, you just get better and better at it. You start noticing better ways of doing things. You start seeing which ads are tracking better. And the more you can run ads, honestly, the better. So this is no name. What is the average starting capital for a new franchisee in Augusta? I don't know that question because we don't actually ask for proof of funds. I know that I can say that for my locations, I would send between 80 and $90,000 per. But I also get two trucks I hire from day one. I have a general manager that I fly out, et cetera. I think if someone doing it themselves, they could do it for less just because as an owner you're going to be more efficient. You're not going to have to pay someone to go like, pick up trucks, paint the trucks, pick up the equipment, all the other stuff that I do as a remote owner. And then if you're doing solo, like you only need one truck, you likely already have it and you just need to paint it. Right. So I would say it probably ranges anywhere from 30,000 to 90,000 is what I've seen. I take a pretty aggressive growth rate for my locations. And so most people don't go out and buy three to five trucks from day one unless they already have existing trucks already. Right. But from brand new ones, brand new owners, I would say like on average probably around 60 to 70. I'd say, like that's the average, whatever that starting capital is what I believe in my opinion should be, is what I believe in my opinion should be your starting capital and opening your new location yourself in June. Yeah, I think I'll. I'll be way lower, honestly. Right. Because as soon as the owner is there, like, you're not having to pay someone to do a lot of the other things that you would otherwise have to spend for like the four weeks that I'm going to be there, for example, like, that's $15,000 of savings just in management costs. Right. And. And payroll, payroll taxes and all the rest of it. So I'll spend less on my location getting it started than the ones we've done already, 100%. So I agree. I'll be keeping track of it all too. If it does go over for ever, even, like if it starts to scale, I'll pump money into it. And like this, this year is definitely going to be more around scaling.

In the challenge. We're trying to do this thing where we get to a certain number of subscribers, then.

I would agree to do it again next year. And starting with 100 bucks, we were going to do that this year. It would make way more views because I'd be out doing a little work. Way more. But number one, I don't think it's super helpful for us as franchisees because most of us do have capital and we want to scale up quickly. And then two, I just don't have the time to be out working with a hundred bucks, trying to get it to a thousand and trying to get to 3,000 so I can buy a truck. Like, we just don't have the time. But I will commit to doing that next year if we hit a certain number of subscribers. So we haven't figured that part out yet. We'll figure it out though. Starting capital for a growth model. Yeah, that's kind of what I talked about. So awesome. Awesome possum.

See here. As a guy that never working in the rain prior to joining Gustic, you can get a lot more done in the rain than you think. Cleanup, bush, trimming, a little mowing. I would encourage you to try it before taking the entire day off. Cool. We start mowing April 1st. We will be sending out emails that we are starting to mow in a week or two for existing customers that are getting a price increase. Should I exclude them from this email and send that as a price increase notice instead? I would personally send out the email to everyone that you're getting started for existing customers. Because the first one, remember this is when your one click estimate emails. This goes two different ways. One is for existing customers. One is for people in your database that are not customers. The people that are in your database that are not existing mowing customers, they're going to get an email basically saying a one click estimate email for mowing, like, we're starting next week, get on the schedule, click this button, get an estimate second there. And then you could potentially also third, I guess you could also send that. Send resend estimates from last year to those people. We're doing that Bellingham shop. I'll let you know how it goes. But. But for. For existing customers that you're trying to raise prices on, I would use that email as a way to raise prices. I'd be like, hey, we're starting mowing next week. Here are your prices for the upcoming season. Weekly, bi weekly. That's it. I wouldn't go into the whole like, why you're raising and all the rest of it, because especially if you've been taken off the past two to three months, there's a really good chance they don't even remember what their prices were. You.