Mike Minutes Mastermind 03/10/2025

Ladies and gentlemen, we are back. Sorry about yesterday. We did the Mike men's mastermind in the airport.

It was horrible Internet and it cut out. So we're gonna pick up where we left off and go from there. I will text this out tomorrow. I was late on the east coast. I'm not gonna send it at 11 o'. Clock. You're all's time. So I will wait till tomorrow morning to send this out via text. But let's go ahead and finish up what we have left off. We'll jump right in.

Number 13.

Sorry, I just asked another question about math but I have another thought. I love that Commencement is upselling clients and I feel they have improved quite a bit in the past last year. Is Max improving at the same pace or upselling like them? Is paying the extra money for a live person worth it? Have any additional thoughts? Yeah, this is actually I mentioned this yesterday why we are moving to the new model. So when we started Max almost two years ago we were building on top of ChatGPT3 and you would think that it's just super easy to switch models and it's not yet to rebuild a lot of stuff. So over the next three months for rebuilding in July we're going to be upgrading to basically ChatGPT4 which allows a lot more generative responses in and part of that is things like upselling, asking other things, et cetera, the capabilities down the road, sell jobs, you know, tap indirectly into the copilot CRM database, etc. What I am tracking is as we also are making huge strides on the in person and the human side is like I can change there faster than the engineers have to recode stuff into Max. It doesn't take three months to make improvements at Command center versus three months improvements on max. So I'm just like I'm just tracking all the math right now. I'm gonna have a really good clear understanding in July once we've gone to the new model, tested it and gone through spring rush with a lot of new training that we are rolling out slowly at Command center in terms of upselling, in terms of asking the 10 out of 10 question.

Just better tracking metrics, like just a lot of things in place. So I will have lots of data thoughts around this. Right now I would be shooting in the dark and it'd be just my hyperbole and opinion because there's been so many variables changed for MAX and for Command Center. So comparing the two is actually kind of difficult when we've made so many changes and I don't have a lot of data so I will have a lot more data after spring rush, that's July and when we start training the new on the new model of chat GPT.

Mr. Anonymous it sounds like when we are in growth mode we aren't typically raising prices we're just pushing to 500k as fast as possible then raising them up.

So let me just clarify that is assuming we have sufficient capital. So if you're running out of cash that's when you would stop at the stage one which is a two hundred thousand dollar level and you might raise prices, make 250 this year and make a bunch of a lot more profit. So just to caveat that that's why we have that, that first stage that we say hey you can stop here and be profitable if you need cash.

Will you give me the logic behind waiting till 500k? If it, if it's taking 2 to 3 years to get from 150 to 500,000 even pushing as hard as we can is it reasonable to raise prices after springers just so there are some profits? What's your thought process on this? Yeah, so again this is, this is the part so there are some profits because what we're trying, the reason 500,000 is the marker is because we're trying to build a business that can run without us and can afford a general manager. Now are there locations that are doing 300 to 400,000 and a 4 GM? Yes, but they were in growth mode to only like 200,000 and they have just raised prices every single year for four plus years and now they're able to afford that gm. But if you want to grow and be able to give it off to a GM and it stay profitable usually you need to be making over 500,000 so that when you make a 15% price increase you're making basically their wages immediately. If you raise prices on by 15% on a $500,000 business at 75 grand you just paid for your GM by just going into profit mode and raising prices one time. And so that's really the goal in doing that.

So it's not a bad thing to stop in the intermediary and stop at 200,000 300,000, raise prices, be more profitable. It's a matter of if you're trying to go fast, getting past 500000 is the goal. But don't, don't you know, go so fast that it's erratic especially your first location usually the second and third locations I see locations owners go to 500000 much faster. They usually are doing it in their second and third year. If it's your first time in the industry, sometimes it takes a little longer, especially if you have to learn sales. There are other people that do it in their first year because they just, they crush sales. But it is all about your close ratio and your ability to sell getting to that $500,000 level. And a lot of times it's just you're easing out of projects and into more recurring work. And so there's a bit of a balancing act there as you merge past 500,000.

Question 15 from Mr. Anonymous When I search Christmas light installers plus my city name, my Gusto light advice page is number six organically, which is climbing. But I'm not showing up under places where my competitors who also do lawn care and other unrelated things are showing up. How do I get on there? I'm not exactly sure what you're talking about under places.

I would need a screenshot of what you're talking about there. I'm guessing you mean under Google listings.

One thing, I'm just looking at something.

Let me see here. Places, Places, places. What are you looking at? Sorry, I'm looking for places. I was like maybe I'd never seen places on Google. I'm not seeing places. Maybe you just mentioned it. Maybe Google listing. So bottom line augustalongerservices.com we have so much domain authority. We're getting on the top of Google very, very quickly for locations. I guess the lights is still on a slow climb. It's less than a year old so there's not as much domain authority. I think it's going to be after this, going into this season that we're going to really climb because now we have we'll have seven. We always say our second spring rush. That's for mowing. I believe this will be our second rush for like Christmas lights. That will really show a huge difference in the SEO and the Google ranking for the Augusta Lights pages because then we'll actually see like last year we actually had traffic. People have reviews. People are mentioning Christmas lights in their reviews. Those are the things that it can look for.

Morgan Latimer has a couple questions. I looked on about 10 owners website to check out instant pricing. I never found one until I asked another owner told me to put all my information and instant pricing would drop down. Is there a reason we don't have anything that says instant pricing quote on the site? It does if you click mowing. So if you go.

If you go to the site, I'm just going to fill in as I talk. So yeah, you got to get all information. And the reason we do this is because if you show the entire form right off the rip it people, the retention drops off dramatically. So when you put all your information in and you click on mailing service, it says right next to instant pricing or sorry, instant price. And then it asks you the further questions. So what we're trying to do with the evolving form is bait them into just the next step. If I'm just giving my contact information, not so bad. I'm just clicking what servers I want, not so bad. If I ask all that in a big long form, it's very, very.

The conversion super low. What we want to do is with ads and with whatever you're doing in terms of emails driving the traffic, telling them they're going to get the instant price increases the chances of them putting their address in dramatically. So we know like from lawn care web design that there's a, almost a 30% drop off in a regular estimate request form. When you just ask for someone's address, 30% of people will just stop and not fill out this information. But if you tell them from the ad that by giving them like put your address in only or just like get an immediate quote, they assume they need to put their address in because it just makes sense. And so we've only see a 3 1/2% drop off when we ask for the address if we've told them they're getting an instant price. So yeah, that'd be my, my two cents on that. We don't, we don't answer your question a little more directly, Morgan. We don't say instant price right at the beginning because we don't know if the customer only wants mowing, but they want like pricing for a project and we're saying instant pricing, we could, they could get a little confused. And so we saw a drop off on the conversion for landscaping and one time jobs and we don't want to jeopardize that revenue because it still makes up a big chunk of people's revenue. And so we saw a drop off there, instant pricing. And then they went to landscaping and they didn't see a price. They weren't clicking the submit button because they were like, where's the price? And so you know what our goal is to do is keep adding instant pricing for these different services.

As time goes on, whether it be chemicals, we've done snow, we've done winter services, but we can keep Adding things like property cleanups down the road, etc. So that down the road would be great if like everything on your site was only instant pricing. You put that right on the front of the website. But we know that if we put that there it really jeopardizes one time projects. So that's what that's a good question. We potentially grabbing more leads if they knew it was inside present. Yes, you're right. So what I would use say Morgan is use your hook on your ads as a way to tell them that they're going to pricing immediately that when they come to the site they know but you now in the ad are pitching mowing. When someone comes to your homepage we don't know if they're they're pitching mowing only but what we do is show them what they're going to select Mowing it says get instant or instant price.

There. Assuming now we know that they're going to do mowing. So that's why we didn't do it. We can't afford to have an extra 15% drop off in people looking for landscaping jobs.

Because they feel like they were duped into getting instant price for a cleanup and they don't get one. So that's why we're careful to put on the main homepage. Good question. 17 Kyle Tarvin from Oklahoma if an owner takes distributions from a location, would that need to be taken out of the profit number before take calculating the cruise quarterly bonus given distributions don't drop on the P mails. I'm just curious if you if we should be doing that. Thanks no so look at the.

The new training. It's up on the the academy. I spent a good amount of time going through the three different ways to do profit sharing.

Based on a P and L and then owner distributions and then revenue shares. Those are the three different ways to pay a general manager. And if you would be your cruise for example I would not include owner distributions on the P and L. I would not include owner's distributions taking away from the team in terms of profit. I would give yourself a good salary that you think you have to replace yourself. So if you ever had a gm, et cetera, make that part of wages and I would leave that on the P and L. So yeah owner distributions are not going to show up on the P and L.

Now if they're given to a general manager they're reconsidered wages. Right. Because they show up on their W2 and that's part of their compensation package.

From Delta. Mike, you Said you see robotics as something we'll take advantage of and benefit from, benefit from over the next 10 to 15 years. I'd love to hear more about how you see that playing out. Do you think it's all opportunity or is there still some risk of disruption? I can see a couple of ways robotics could potentially impact our industry negatively. Specialized mowing robots. These don't seem too far off, maybe even IPO time in eight to 10 years and could become widely accessible to maybe even through a subscription model from a major player like Amazon or Apple. They can handle stairs trimming, edging while mowing frequently enough to eliminate clippings. Do you think they'll replace traditional services or their way for us to integrate them into the model? Okay, yeah, So I think about this stuff all the time. Here's why I don't think this is going to happen.

I believe that companies like Amazon and Apple are going to go after higher margin services that are, that are 200, $300 an hour tasks before they go after mowing. That is 20 or $25 an hour tasks. And this is very evident with what's going on with AI right now. They're going after the coder. They're trying to put coders out of business. And so the reason is because a really good coder is worth 300 to $500,000 a year. And so if they can essentially replace half of those and save people hundreds of thousands of dollars, they're a lot more willing to pay like engineer what would otherwise be an engineer. They're willing to pay a lot more to have that software or have that quote unquote robot. It's a higher margin problem to solve. When it comes to robotics. There's a lot of legislation and issues around this. And this is actually why Apple just not just like last year canceled their Titan project, which was their car project, and they spent billions of dollars on it. And I believe it's because they realized that why would we sell a car for 20 or $30,000 when we are currently selling a computer that sits on someone's desk for 20 or $30,000? The specked out Mac Pro is 20 to $50,000. If you get the desktop version with all the bells and whistles, the margin on it is significantly higher. They service on that, significantly higher, the risk and liability significantly higher, the manufacturing cost easier, the shipping costs easier. There's way bigger, more expensive problems to solve. These companies are going to go after. And even someone like Apple with a huge total addressable market that could have made A huge debt into driverless cars and autonomy literally bailed on it because they're like, forget this. Gordon's not going to. So I don't think. No, Apple or Amazon makes specialized mowing robots. Your second point is that the one that I want to lead into humanoid robots, that's where they start to make more sense in terms of Amazon or Apple getting involved. So let's talk about that one. There's so many legislation, regulations about the blades of a mower going so fast. People like Toro, John Deere side, all these companies that can do this right now are so limited by it. That's why I don't actually see it happening. Still, many, like quite a few years even the technology could potentially do it. So humanoid robots, this feels like a little more distant possibility. But if homeowners could buy or finds a $20,000 humanoid that takes care of all household choice chores, including lawn care and property cleanups, could that change the demand for our services? Since you see this as more an opportunity than a threat, how do you envision us leveraging robotics? Would love to hear your thoughts.

We have not been able to make a robot that just mows grass.

The idea that in the next, even 10 years, we're going to create a humanoid robot that's going to be able to mow the grass and also put together things in your house, wash the dishes and do 100 other things. Like, we are so far away from that. And I believe that by the time it comes about.

The advantage, there'll be still so much like there are physical constraints to a robot that is, let's say, $20,000 and weighs 150 pounds. It cannot lift 100 pounds of concrete, it cannot lift a 20 pound, you know, hedge trimmer on top of a ladder, etc. Like, there's a lot of limitations here. I know that I'm very technically forward. We. We are so far away from this happening. And.

Yeah, like, we. Yeah, like, we're so far away from this happening, especially from it being actually, like, legally possible to put one of these things on a ladder, to have them carrying a chainsaw, to have, like, we haven't even got the robot mower figured out, let alone a robot operating the mower that could potentially drive it into the road. That could do a lot of things that aren't going to have. It's not going to have the capability that even a specialized robot has. So in my opinion, remote mowing is going to be the thing that I see really taking off. And so I have two, two different methods of robotics. One is you strap lidar into an existing system. I've said that for a long time. The trouble with this is line of sight. It is the manufacturers wanting to have nothing to do with it because it's a huge liability for them to put that on their equipment. Like, right. Not going to, like, strap it on there. Okay, go. Because they're going to want to ensure line of sight, because if someone does something crazy with that mower, they can help be held liable. Liable. So line of sight can be a big deal. Obviously, these manufacturers and liability insurance, etc. The second route, which I start, I've started to see as like an intermediary before humanoids and actual fully autonomous. Full autonomy is where there are cameras on the mower and you're able to get people to be able to operate 5, 10, 15 of these at a time because they're running like 90% autonomous. And when they hit edge cases that are difficult, it's able to come back to a control center, command center, where they can take control of the robot and use the cameras to immediately do the service. I've seen this in action. It works. It's just a matter of scaling, perfecting the manufacturing and the software. And so that's where my head's been a lot recently. But we are a long ways away. Like, when I think we're about to test, I will be letting you know. Trust me, I'll be very excited about it. I'm not. You notice I didn't post anything about the robot mowers publicly, just to Augusta Nation. Just because, like, what they're doing is completely illegal right now, to be honest. It's completely illegal. You can't. You can't mass distribute those. And so there's ways that even we have a huge moat by being. If we could mass distribute inside of Augusta and not have to worry about selling them, but we just make them for ourselves, that'd be like, my route I currently see happening. But we are a long, long ways off. So I just want to get everyone's hopes up and think like, oh, it's around the corner. Like, we will not be testing these at my locations for I. I would say at least two to three years.

A couple more. Morgan Lattimore. I'm transitioning over from copilot and starting new in copilot this. Oh, sorry. I'm starting transitioning over from Dropper and starting new and Copilot this season was the best, best way to initiate the start of the season with my clients. Do I Contact each one. Do I send them each one an estimate? I just scheduled them and show up and risk not getting paid if. If they don't, didn't want to start. So I think these are two different questions. In terms of switching from jobber to copilot, I don't think you need to contact your customers. I would wait until the first invoice is due and then from there asking for basic credit card on file. The title would just be saying like, we are now Augusta Long here. I'd bake right into that. Like, you have an invoice due to put your card and file here and then follow up with those people over the course of a week or two. I would not just send them an email and say, hey, we've switched. Put a card on file. I would wait until there's an invoice that is due before I ask them to do that. It'll literally jump from 5% compliance to 50% plus if you have like, hey, overdue invoice action required. So I would also never contact the customer and tell them when you're getting started. Like every single customer, hey, we're starting next week. I wouldn't do that.

Personally, I'm a big fan of they sign up this. This first year, Morgan, you might, if you, if they're used of you always saying, hey, we're starting March 15th or whatever, maybe the first year you do. But in my opinion, until someone's canceled, we're going to show up and do their service. And I'm okay with two or three people that I might have to refund their first service. But I'm able to get all of my customers to start March 1st. Like in my locations, everyone just starts March 1st across the board. And if a few people, I need a refund because they moved and they forgot to tell me or something, who cares? I do not want it trickling in over the course of three or four weeks. And then when people start four weeks late, I'm now doing an initial MO essentially, and they're not going to like the initial price. So. But you might need to bait. You might need that next season, Morgan, if you trained your customers to be otherwise. When you go into fall season and you use winter services in that winter services octa, you're telling them you're going to show up on a certain date in the spring if they don't do winter services. And if they do winter services, you just carry on anyways. So this first season, you might want to initiate service like that. But down the road the way that you do fall winter cleanup, winter services and that opt out email or like the way you opting out of winter services sets you up for a no contact renewal in the spring. Last one, Brent Cedar City, Utah we are in profit mode and have raised prices a couple times in the last two years. Our intention going into this year was to raise prices one last time which will help us afford the manager over this location as well. We have never done winter services at this location. There's a five month period of no mowing and a four month period of complete collapse. I want to solve seasonitis with winter services. All right. This is very definitive language. I love it. My main question, we are pushing the boundaries with how high our prices can go. Am I shooting myself in the foot a little bit raising prices and potentially losing clients when I'm hoping as many as possible carry over to winter services.

Okay. Somewhat under the. Okay, let's start, let's start with this one then.

I think your prices should be determined by your capacity. If you're at capacity, I would raise prices.

Yeah. So I would not worry about that. I would. Raising prices is to determine based fund capacity. If you're not close to capacity, I'd continue to grow.

Or cut capacity down because it sounds like you're not trying to grow the location, you just try to make it more profitable. Which if you're in profit mode, you should be up against capacity. If you hit capacity, you're raising prices.

I don't, I wouldn't think of shooting yourself in the foot about raising prices because.

Let'S say you lose 5 or 10% of your customer base. Let's say it's 20 customers. Like worst case scenario, if you lose 20 customers but you're able to double your profits on the 180, I would take that over like, oh, I hope those 20, I'm able to convert half of them into winter services. Okay, let's do the Math. Math. That's 10 customers. You've gotten winter service because you didn't raise their price for mowing. I would also say the people that leave during a price increase are the least likely person to accept winter services. From what I have seen, the locations that are in profit mode and have raised prices two or three times and kept that customer, those have the highest conversions into winter services. So I'm thinking like Nick Reed's location. Other locations I've seen where they, they just raised prices. Like for the past four years, customers have been with them. They stay with you through all that are usually price insensitive and they just want services done. They want to stay. They don't want, they don't want a bunch of back and forth winter services, high conversion. So I think you actually prime your customers potentially Brent. The 180 that stay, those will be the ones that accept winter services. I'm just going to throw numbers out there. I would say their conversion might be say 60% if a customer is able to get through a price increase. Whereas the ones that leave they might be like 20 or 30% of them because they're not going to accept winter services anyways. So I would just food for thought on that one. Somewhat unrelated question, we have over 200 clients. They're not mowing clients but have recurring services like fertilization, weed control or roundup sprays. How might you approach these clients? Would you do an opt out for clients like that? I imagine first priority is talking to them in person or giving them a call or personalized video. I love your thoughts on any of this. Yeah, this is a huge opportunity because they're already used to be showing up. You have some sort of pricing that's on a recurring basis. So you can just bake that into winter services.

Yeah. And you have 200 of them. I think you can get at least 50, 60 of these to convert into winter services if you build the winter service packages around the pain points they have with fertilization, weed control, spraying, etc. So this is going to be not a one year fix. I think this will take this year, Brent. I think you'll be like it was okay, like we got maybe a 15 to 25% conversion. Just stick with it. I promise you in your third year of winter services because you're gonna have to convert. What's gonna happen is a lot of people have used to be stopping during the off season. They don't convert very well. I've just seen this more and more and more. They're the ones that you have to refund and it's just confusing for them. It's the people that you sign up this year that will go right into winter services usually at a 40 to 60% depending on.