Mike Minutes Mastermind 03/12/2024

All right, we are live.

Let me just put this into here.

One quick announcement, nothing super major. The pro shop did finally.

Get the paper stock and paper weight.

Options added to most of the designs. So when you're checking out a new product, you should be able to.

Choose if you want card stock or paper weight. If you want thicker like card stock or if you want thinner like a flyer material, it should be able to have that option. It doesn't change the price a whole lot, honestly usually so usually I go with the nicer quality stuff but every single product's a little different. Things like postcards, obviously you're going to go to postcard stuff. Flyers, you have a little more optionality there in terms of quality. All right, I already saw the first question of the day because I opened it up on my phone accidentally this morning. So I actually have an answer for this one which is good. I'm glad I saw this one. So let me zoom in a little bit.

This up.

All right, Joel from Lafayette. So again I saw this question already so that's why I'm going to have a an answer I think. All right, Joel from Lafayette, thanks for the visualization yesterday on call categories. Adding on to Ryan's question yesterday about restarting service after payment, I emailed hope for some information about how restarting service after payment works and didn't get an answer. Maybe Liz or someone at CC could document answer on the Facebook group so they do respond within 24 hours. Typically they I I follow up with them. They did not CCU on a email chain. So I'm going to read verbatim what they said here. All right, let's see here.

Okay, so the overdue automation sequence will eventually be refined to basically fix this issue.

If they so that if they add a payment on file there would actually be an automation trigger. Right now we don't track clients that do this.

So sorry, I should have read the whole question. I apologize. If a client's I'm not even sharing my screen.

Get together. Goodness.

Cool. All right, now you should be able to see it. There you go. All right, adding on, we talked about that. All right. If a client's services are paused due to non payment, how do we franchisees know to restart those services after receiving payment? So the short answer, I know you got this in the email back to.

Joel was that eventually there'd be a trigger for when a payment is added back into someone's account like that. I went into the automations. Let me go back into it here. There is a way to have it where it is triggered based on when the payment is added. And so what you could do if you wanted is you could create a tag that for example, okay, this person, I have paused them, I've stopped them because of non payment. Because command center is not going to stop someone due to non payment. You would see the non payment unless you're in the invoicing department, which is a different topic. But assuming that you're not in the invoicing department and they're not managing your dispatch board and your invoicing, assuming that what you could do is you could tag these clients and then have an automation that when a payment is added and they have that tag on their account, it can notify you. That would probably be the thing that I would recommend until what you said here and as like until there is a service pause trigger for automations and then you can combine it with when the payment is made. So right now what you could do since. So if you're like, hey, this person's overdue, you're doing your invoicing like, oh, they're overdue. I would probably make a tag that has like.

Pause services is due to non payment. You could make it as a tag and then make an automation that anyone that has that tag, if a payment is made on their account, it triggers an email to you. That would probably be my recommendation.

But unless you're in the invoicing department and the dispatching, I would imagine they're not going to ever pause someone's services on your behalf if you're doing invoicing.

All right. Why do I have so many tabs open? Mercy Goodness.

Okay, go from Lafayette. Oh, we got an add on. We got an add on special this morning. Let's go add on to Mike Cooper's question yesterday. Are there plans in the copilot roadmap to improve the client portal to convince and train clients to go there first? For example, I submit a feature request to add support pages to the client portal for common questions or issues that can't be standardized like the client. The copilot help pages on help Crunch are customized like a client facing wiki. I could also see things like putting some view or link to the most recent estimate and invoice on the dashboard so they are more visible to clients. Yeah, so two things. One of. Oh, second question. Sorry, here, I'll answer the first one. So yeah, we do have in the roadmap for copilot basically in your wiki it'd be where you could make specific articles customer facing, which would then add to an FAQ page for them on their client portal. We can, we can see how many people are on the, how long they're on client portals. It's extremely short. They're typically using it to make transactions and they usually don't go there first. They don't go there as like I wonder if my service, you know, if, if core aeration, what it does for my lawn. They usually won't go there to their client portal to like find those sort of things. However, I do think it's valuable so that way you can reference it in your estimate description. You could literally say like you could link them over to your wiki, your, your wiki articles that are customer facing and we would rename them faq. So it'd be an FAQ tab in your client portal. That's on the, the backlog. But yes, it is in there. And then you have a second question. Is there a way that the web team could link our client portals from our guest to websites like most companies do? If not, is there a plan to make this happen to someday? Yes, there is. I wonder if many clients prefer to call instead of going to the client portal because the only way to get the client portal is to search for a past email that has link. Yeah, great, great point. So yeah, we are working on this. Every single location is going to have a different URL. So if you go to your settings and you go to client portal there's a URL that you could that basically is going to be what your that button would link to. So I'm working with the web team to see how we can streamline this and make it where it's simple. So you can add the button or you can take this, the button off basically inside of the current dashboard form that you have for customizing your website. And then all you have to do is copy and paste that link in there and say hey, I want the button added. So we are working on that and now that everyone's in copilot I think we can do it. So, so it also would help command center when people are like on this long diatribe like hey could you just go to our website, let's log you in. And we can help them log in too because we can see their username and password if they have a problem and let's get you inside and like, you know, go through this together. And we're looking at, so we're looking at the same thing. It would be helpful there. Usually what they're doing though is they're just like, hey, I'm going to text you the link. Click on it and then they go in that way. So, Alex, at Stanwood Camino, we are running a small budget general campaign on Google Ads, the older Mike Andy style, with a lot of search terms. I want to add a parallel campaign strictly for mowing for the spring rush, hoping to attract mowing clients only. Which one of these terms do you think will work best for these separate mowing campaigns? Mowing, mowing, Camino, mowing, Camano, mowing and Camino.

So I would say just use all of them because the question is, what would you want any of these.

To be going to you? Yes. Assuming you have a radius of who you want to be targeting. If someone puts in the word mowing and they're in your target area, you want to be showing up. So whether they put mowing Camino or just mowing, as long as you have that bandwidth to say, hey, in this area is the only place I'm going to be targeting. You'd rather go for a more generic search term because even the word mowing, there's only so many people searching that word in the area you're targeting every day. So you usually want to go a little bit wider with the. The terms.

Thomas, Littleton, Colorado can you show us how to send a one click correctly without allowing the email to be sent to clients we don't want it to? It seems very limited to how to filter out specific target customers. I'm hesitant on sending because my concern is we are only we are going to annoy clients and cause them to unsubscribe, which would be poisoning the well we work so hard on creating. We have multiple clients that have already unsubscribed because of the earlier email situation this year, more multiple are sent. I don't want them to feel as though they are just another number in our system. Or am I looking at this the wrong way? Consider the filters below. How to send one click to estimates for spring cleanups. Filter all clients received a quote within the last two weeks. Filter out new clients within the last three weeks. Filter out clients who are on the schedule who have upcoming spring cleanup work. Filter out clients who have received this service and have been completed. Okay, one second.

Okay, gonna go to the contacts page.

So here, let me open up my profilot.

Oops, I'm the wrong one.

Okay, now I go into my. Here.

Because I think, I think some of these you can do already. Thomas. So for example, like when they, when this. The client was. If they're new clients. For example.

Let me just see here. All right, I already have these filters set up so I'm going to have to change new ones. Add filter. Okay. So you could do.

Service date range. So if you wanted to filter those people out. See here can we do. Do not.

I know we're adding more of like not include in there. Oh man. I already have like a gazillion filters in here. One.

Service date range.

Then you can do that. So yeah, you could use service date range, service scheduled. So like if this service has been scheduled up so service scheduled. And then you could do if it's pending or if it's ever been scheduled.

As some filters. But that's going to filter like the people who have it or. But you could do never scheduled, right? So you could do service scheduled, never scheduled. So some of these you could do. I understand that some of these specific ones you're talking about right now might not be exactly that way. But.

You know, if you're, if you're trying to get really lasered into for example within the last three weeks. Let's see here. Add filter. Let's see here. Registered date range. So you could use that one and then just go from three weeks backwards.

Register date range. Yes, I would just do your registered date range. So for example like from whenever you got started, like you several months back till three weeks ago. Just make sure you only get those people. And then I add another filter about the date range of spring spring cleanups. Assuming you are using a spring cleanup item and service should be able to do that. And then the last three weeks I would use if they registered the date. Like yeah, you do the date range and just don't include the last three weeks. And the challenging part is going to be filtering all clients who received a quote within the last two weeks. I don't think we have that one. One second here.

Estimates contain services estimates. So you could do it based on people who have, who have an estimate that receives a certain have inside the estimate has a specific item in service. But you can't do it based on if an estimate like the the date range of the estimate being sent.

So there's service completed or invoiced. There's estimates contain services estimates contains packages. So yeah, down the road we can definitely add more filtering in there. It is kind of an ever ending, never ending filtering requests. But there's specific ones like if you're trying to narrow it down, we can definitely get them added in eventually.

Boom.

Okay, Kyle Tarvin, can we get A business card template for a Google Review QR code spot on the back. Our guys are passing out the Google review flyers after each job. But it would be nice for them just to carry their business cards with their name and a Google Review QR code in the back. Just an idea. The QR code would have to be specified to your URL. So if you use the Photoshop files, I don't think you can add an image on Pro Shop like on vistaprint's thing. But your QR code will have to be unique to you. Like we don't have a specific one link. We do for the testimonial videos that we have for everyone, which by the way, I haven't talked about those enough. They're, they're pinned to the Facebook page. You can use testimonials of the customers. We have like several dozen of them in your ads if you would like. I think it'd be a good move. Obviously use that as the creative and then use the words that we talked about in the Facebook ads training. For example.

You can download the video if you wanted to edit it, put someone's name on it, or put your graphics or your phone number or whatever. You can do whatever you want there. But in terms of QR code, the QR code is, yes, unique to each location because each of our Google listings require different QR code. However, there is a solution. We're working on this. I was hoping, I was hoping we could get done in January, February. But we're trying to add one more part to the automate or to the.

Review collection process for tech. Doing it via text and it's gonna be really cool. So it's gonna be free to everyone. Let me see if I can show and we put this skeleton of this site up. One second.

Okay.

I just want to see if I can announce this or not yet.

Okay. We're close the site. Front end sites basically got most of what we have on there. But I want to just hold it on, hold on to it for now. But within the next few weeks I'll be announcing the review software and then eventually down the road I'd like to integrate with Copilot so that way you can integrate an automation inside of Copilot with the review sequence inside of collecting the automations. So basically the software is going to cost like 100 bucks for other people. It'll be free for everyone inside our destination. So hopefully next few weeks I'll be announced that. We were going to announce it a couple weeks ago, but there's one Specific texting automation I want to use for collecting reviews. And it'll be part of that, so.

But yeah, like if you have a QR code, you just got to make sure it's custom that. That I'll be taking it up. It's over there.

Oh, she wants it. Okay. I'll be like 10 or 15 minutes. No, you're good. Thank.

You. All right, we got a long winded question. All right, Eric from Largo got a few questions. Training questions. Sorry, it's long winded contacts. I have two employees, one vet and one on his third week. Got it. All right, how long should a trainer bonus be up for grabs? I know we should aim for having a new team and profitable in two weeks. If they aren't super profitable in every aspect after that, where is the training period line drawn? Depends on a person's progress or a trainer's seal of approval. I haven't had a ton of employees, but surely some pick things up faster than others, especially when learning. When starting with specific lawn care experience and familiarity with the equipment scenario, I have a new hire I spent the first two weeks with, but now have him hitting routes with my veteran employee. Since the new guy is still green and didn't have any longer experience, he will inevitably slow down the vet for a bit. So I was thinking he should get the trainer bonus for some time, maybe one week. Also to encourage him to check behind and not rush to compensate the newbie slowing things. If someone is trained on equipment after that point, but we still need to work on something like a pulling a trailer, would you do a manual adjustment for that time so their P50P isn't hurt by additional training time? Okay, last. Okay, so these multiple questions. Okay, great. So I'm okay with this. I just think that if in those first two weeks you have a checklist and you really nail every single day, all 10 days that they're coming in.

They will actually like practice and ask more questions because they know they have to hit certain benchmarks. So be my first thing. So instead of saying like, after two weeks, we're gonna see where you're at. I'd like after day one, we'll see where you're at. After day two, we'll see where you're at on this thing. Well, that for day three, we'll see where you're at in this. I think having more checkpoints will help get them trained up in the two weeks. And I've seen, you know, average training times take four or five weeks and usually it's because it's like an open ended. We don't really check in, we don't have checkpoints, we don't sign off anything. We don't have benchmarks of what you should be learning throughout. So I would really push on like the idea that hey, can, can we get those 10 days really dialed in.

And have benchmarks of every single task or switch we learn along the way? That'd be the first thing. Would I add an extra week potentially in this case, yes. You could talk to your experience employee like hey, what do you think is fair? Etc but I would really encourage you going forward to make those two weeks more regimented so they, they know if they're falling behind or not. It's not like if it's not open ended it's like at the end of the two weeks it's like okay, great, you did not do well. These two things. You have one week to improve and then I'm gonna give a coach, a trainer bonus to that, that trainer for one week and then it's like predetermined and it's like signed off on and good to go. That'd be my recommendation. Last, is there a good gauge of balancing setting someone up for success with ample training versus allowing them to fail and learn firsthand? I'm trying to be less controlling and micromanaging but all but still not throwing someone to the fire. That's why like having those check ins every day, like you now have 10 check ins instead of one at the end of two weeks. Doing that will allow them to will set them up for success because if they, if they quote unquote fail and allowing them to fail will mean that they like don't please the blower correctly or like they mix the two cycle incorrectly or they do one little thing wrong instead of them doing an entire route coming back to the office and everyone was messed up because they, they the blades were upside down. I've had that happen. So those are the type of things I'd be careful of. And I think really just nailing the two day having all those check ins is going to be like the thing that kind of ultimately fixes all these problems. I know it takes more work, I know that it takes more time for you or your general manager to check in with the trainer every single have the sign off on each task within the 10 days et cetera. But trust me like doing that, having those like 10 check marks, it's like when you're running, when you're ear pacing yourself for like a marathon, they don't like check at mile 15 how they're doing every single half mile, every single quarter mile, every single mile. They're checking in to see what their pacing is like and they usually know around like mile 16 to 20 what their finishing time is going to be based upon their pace. So what you want to do focus on during training is like pacing them and it's like okay, you're behind but know that on day two, not day, you know, 14, after you spend a bunch of time with them. Another they need a whole nother week. Right. Because if someone really wants the job and they know they're a little bit behind, they'll ask a lot better questions. Then they'll make sure they learn those skills. So I know it's more of like a future. It's in the short term like agreeing with your veteran on what they need to feel compensated well is probably the right move at this stage when you only have one or two employees. Coach Connor. So you always have the few that leave a bad taste in your mouth. We have several repeat offenders from what the crew tells me and sends me that do not pick up their dog poop. Nice. We send email reminders with automations. It is in our welcome and thank you email. The crew knocks on the door to Talk with customers, etc. Is it worth charging a 25 fee to just pick it up ourselves? As long as isn't the mowing estimate or the thank you and welcome. Last thing I want to do is lose customer. But at the same time a callback for an issue that was the customer's fault. Not being able to mow the backyard is also costing us money. Okay. Yeah. Trying to figure out what the best solution is. I'd rather collect on the removal than to skip the yard. Maybe it's a service that we begin to offer while there are to all customers. Yeah, I and I would jack up the price though. Like I don't think I'd charge $25 that I want to make it so juicy for my crew on P4P that they are excited when someone forgets to do the dog poop. We never did that. But I personally if you're only making, you know, picking up maybe five yards I would make the price extremely high where the customer still wants to collect it. But if they forget it's like hey, we will still do your lawn but there's going to be this fee associated and we will pick up the poop. But I want my crew like super excited because they know that they can make an extra 15 or 20 bucks in like a few minutes instead of being like super mad that someone forgot.

Coach Connor number two, where should we be putting notes or command center when we do stuff in a customer's account? I see Command center exclusively using call notes, but in the past we have always used customer notes. I understand why they're using call notes, but they are not reading the customer notes part. I had an example last week where a customer was called twice about paying an invoice. He had a third party vendor platform that I had to use for invoicing and I made a note in the customer notes not to call the person to check with me first on collecting as I would have to manually update copilot. Just wanted to know the workflow so I can leave open note for command center and it be read when needed. Yeah, that should have been read. Like customer notes are the sticky notes. Those are the things that they should always stay with the customer. That's why we try to keep them as clean as possible. There should only be a few in there. And then the call notes are more like an ongoing. Every single time they contact us, we're making call notes in there. So why they didn't see that, I don't know. You can submit a yellow slip. I would imagine what could have happened is they went directly to the invoice and started following up on it instead of checking the client's profile. That's likely what I'm guessing how they missed that. But yeah, the customer note should not be missed because it's like it. We guard them with our life and that is like we only put stuff in the customer notes that are like always needing to be seen. Like they're deaf. They're away for the next three weeks and they're paranoid about robbers. Like whatever is like super like must be seen goes in customer notes and we clean that out if needed. It's the call notes that's more of a running total, like a running ongoing thing. So feel free to submit those a yellow sub so that they can actually see what happened there. I'm gonna guess they went straight to the invoice based upon the automation instead of looking at the client's profile first. But you're. You were right to put that in the customer profile. Customer notes is the right move. Garrett from Glendale, Colorado. We are currently a month booked out for four people and spring rush doesn't really happen until late April. And 70% of new mowing clients sign up in May. This is a good problem to have. We are in profit mode. And are drastically reducing service area, turning all ads except Google local services off hiring to ensure we have about one extra person at any given time. Getting rid of clients that are furthest away for drive time and raising prices on new mowing and projects to a hundred dollars an hour from $80 an hour. These are all good problems. We will start mowing April 1st and we'll raise all existing and recurring to $100 per hour in mid to late April when the grass starts growing. This is our second spring rush and we have never been so busy this time of year. I am really trying to avoid burning out our team and being absolutely overwhelmed this spring. What are other things I should be doing that I'm not? We kept myself and three others on through the winter, ended 25k in January and 31k in February. We have about $30,000 worth of recurring that will resume April 1st. And I'm already struggling to keep up with everything and I've been working the field a lot more the last couple months. Wow, this is a good problem to have, dude. I would say raise your prices now instead of waiting until the middle of April, just raise them now. Like tell people hey, we're starting April 1st. Even if you do a little bit early, like we're starting or mowing your new prices at this. Don't even say ninja. Here's your prices. Put them significantly higher. Like going from 80 to 100 is a 25 increase. So I like that. But they do that at your minimum. The way that you are talking about this, you're not even in mowing season yet and you're already maxed out. And if you're in profit mode, which means you're not going to expand capacity, I would be very ruthless with your price increases. Otherwise you are going to be completely overwhelmed. Like the fact of the matter is people are going like you're seeing already your four weeks booked out. You're not even in your spring rush. Technically people are booking on the instant quote significantly more. They're they're able to get all their leads after hours. With max, you're going to get overwhelmed. So unless you dramatically raise prices to cut people out now, you are going to get overwhelmed. You're four weeks booked out. That's crazy. So it's good. This is a good problem to have. But I would just say be more ruthless with your price increases and do it sooner than you anticipated because you need to make some capacity so you can take some customers during spring rush. But I would be much more ruthless with your with Your price increases like significantly more. Please get on a coaching call like this needs to be. You should be going up to 110, potentially 120 because you, you're going to replace all of the people you potentially lose probably in the matter of a few weeks. So if you're in profit mode, this is, this is the net, the math you look like and that is like you hit capacity, raise prices, no questions asked. So set that in your mind because if you're not going to go out buy more trucks and you're going to stick with several employees like you have, you could probably do 60 to $70,000 a month in revenue with just you and those three employees. It is very possible if you ruthlessly raise prices and actually use capacity based growth. So fantastic problem to have when you're in profit mode. Great work.

Max Harwood from Burnaby all invoices from yesterday were auto charged. Hey Mike, it seems like a setting was changing copilot yesterday resulting all my invoices from March 11th being double charged. 11th. Okay. It's yesterday. Okay. Typically I invoice daily. When I woke up and checked my email this morning a client said they charged their card twice. So I look at their account and notice the second charge was from auto charge. I have changed no settings on my account and auto change has never been able to pass. Then I noticed There was about $2,000 in credit on my account from cars being charged yesterday. I have submitted a bug report. As you know, this is a potential break trust with clients who put their card on file and I'm not very happy with the circumstances. I would request that if changes like this are taking place we are notified and given the opportunity to take action before the cards are automatically charged. Does this create unnecessary work on the end? Yeah, I'm not, I'm not familiar. We would never change someone's settings purposefully if there was a feature change that I know. So thank you for submitting the bug report. They will look at that and they'll take a look at your account specifically and see if it was a setting or if they something actually changed.

And auto has never been enabled in the past. I have changed no settings in my account and auto charge had never. So you're saying auto charge was enabled. Got it. Yeah. Thank you for submitting the bug report. They can take a look at it but we, we didn't push anything that would automatically change everyone to auto charge. We did not do that. But they can look at your settings and see if something potentially was kind of sitting there. As a landmine and see what happened there.

But yeah, we would, you know, definitely we would never change a setting without. Like that to that extent, without letting everyone know if we actually knew about it.

Very good question, Thomas. Thanks. Thank you, Thomas, for a great question. I don't remember what the question was, but it was fantastic. I just submitted a Google form question. Google form question. Okay. All members. Okay, this is Max.

Got it. Yeah. So basically you're saying all auto chargers turned on. So yeah, talk, talk to. What I would do is WhatsApp use the WhatsApp for.

For. For a gustination. So it's in. In the Facebook group WhatsApp that they'll look into your account and they'll see if there was a setting on the back end that potentially might have triggered it to be turned on at a certain time or something like that. But yeah, we would never turn on your auto charge. If you have it off, we will leave it off. Unless Command center accidentally touched something. I don't know. But they'll dig into it for you. Don't bother atc. Just use or don't bother Command Center, ATC will dig into for you and see what's up and see why that potentially could happen. The only thing I can think of is if there was a setting on the back end to enable it or if Command center turned it on somehow. But it's kind of tough to turn everyone's auto charge on because if you have everyone specifically done, use individual client settings, override the global settings when it comes to things like auto charge. But they will dig into it and that team that will be answering that chat will get in here in about an hour. All right, everyone have a fantastic Tuesday. I'll see you guys tomorrow. Take care.