Mike Minutes Mastermind 03/15/2024

All right. Hello, Augusta Nation. Hope you're doing amazing. I keep looking off to my right. It's because I can't see my cursor and I'm officially on the wrong. Okay, I'm going to switch WI FI networks. Give me one second.

This in here.

Copy this.

All right, so for everyone watching yesterday, someone said we should do the mastermind live with the team here as getting trained. That's what we're doing.

Okay, so now YouTube link is for everyone on Facebook. They can grab go in there if they'd like. Okay, let's see here.

Cool. All right, so for everyone that is watching that's not here, these are the eager beavers. This is early, before the day has started. See if this cord can reach. Oh, there we go. Let's go.

Okay. Okay. Last day of training. Let's see here. I've got more people walking in. Okay.

A couple quick announcements had to go over.

All right, there is a wait list that's going to end up becoming on some of the departments for command center. So if you have. If you want to be inside of a specific department and you think it's coming up, highly recommend that you fill out your form on the dashboard. Liz told me at least two departments that probably next couple weeks will end up having a wait list. So if you know you want it, I'd submit it now so that next Tuesday it gets actually registered again. Every Tuesday is when the changes are made in the departments at command center. So if you know there's one coming up, you want to be able to. I know specifically the email departments filling up and then the.

Collections. I think it was. I forget there's another department. But. So again, what we're going to do is on that form, if there's a waitlist for department, you will see it on the form. It'll say like collection department wait list. And then you'll just know that you're probably not going to get in right away. But we're probably still a couple of weeks away from that. But if you are planning to join and you're like, I don't think, you know, it's starting to become too much, I just recommend go ahead and put your name into that department now on that form so that way you don't end up having to wait so several weeks once the spring rush is more intense. All right, let's jump into some questions.

Oh, there's six of them now. Let's go. Okay, so this is the part that's tricky because usually have a secondary screen. So Boom. Let's go down here.

Share screen and see this one.

Okay, and we're live. Let's see here. Now I want to move this over.

Okay, next time, Lee, I'm bringing you over my other secondary screen. Okay, here we go. Now we're live. We got questions. First question is from Mike Athens from Tennessee. I have a friend who owns the an H vac company. He told. He was telling me one thing that they do is when they were working on a house, they would put a door hanger on the houses around the house that they are working on. But it is not to sell something. It simply states that they are working in the neighborhood and if their trucks are on the way or if they have problems just to call the number and they will fix the problem right away. He said they get a ton of calls saying how much they appreciate their caring. Do you think that would be worthwhile for us to do? I was thinking that we could hang something like that then a few weeks later. Few weeks, hang an instant quote door hanger. I like the idea definitely if you're doing projects, like if you're doing a project for three or four days, it is annoying to most neighbors. Especially if you have trucks, trailers, you're going to probably block their driveway at some point. You might need their driveway or their access point at some point in the job. So definitely don't think it's a bad idea. I'd be all over this. Especially if you do projects and again assuming that your crew is going to actually go put them out. So if you want to enforce that somehow or reward it somehow or if you're going to be there for like a three week job at the beginning of the project to get started, you could kind of make sure it gets done. Coach Connor, which I'm going to guess is Connor's dead. What does Paul the AI mean when they are going through notes from command center? Does this mean that we missed the call? Yeah. So we're going to. You're basically, this is Max AI. We're, we're internally, we call it Poly AI. We just talked about this this morning at Command center. We are going to use Max AI as like our internal communication language as well. So you'll see that change to Max AI. Basically that means that Max took the call. So if it says like hey X, Y and Z, this is from Max AI, you know that Max took that call and that's where they're getting that information from. So whether it be they're following up on a call that was at Night and Max AI took it, et cetera. So you'll see it switching to Max AI. I actually messaged them all this morning saying hey, we need to be standard and using the words Max AI even internally. It'll take them a while to change their vocabulary. But it's important because like we have him on the trucks, he answers the phone and eventually like the robot on someone's property will be named Max. So like it's, it's part of the branding. So we are working on getting everyone's vocabulary changed.

Kyle Tarvin from Oklahoma looking to make sure my logic is sound. Please poke holes in my plan as you see fit. All right, big question. We are picking up new yards $5, $10, $15 under price just to increase close ratio and ramp up growth quickly. My plan is to be able to pick up an additional 100 to 150 ish mowing customers this spring, March to June. After our initial spring blitz, the plan is to switch into profit mode end of June on this location for the remainder of the year. So we need to ensure we have a large enough customer base to support the location. In order for the crew to to be making any sort of PPP and profitability on the jobs, we need to raise prices once we hit capacity. I know that my thought process is we need to hit capacity by June before the summer hits so we can capitalize on increasing prices and not lose a ton of customers because of that. Few questions. Would it be wise to raise a customer we picked up this year by $10 in one go or is that too much at once? Would June be too late to raise prices in order to maximize the amount of customers lost? Oh, minimize the amount of customers lost. If we have to push growth hard and plan by May to be raising prices and switching to profitability mode, I want to be mentally ready to push for that. Yeah, like again, I really don't care about timing when it comes to price increases. It completely comes down to capacity. Right. So if you're going to hit capacity and if you hit capacity by, you know, may raise prices if you're not hitting capacity. My concern, my only concern is if you try to like you're gunning for capacity and then you don't get the 100, 150 jobs, that's the only issue I see with this, this logic because let's say you get 75 or 80 now, they're underpriced, you're not at capacity and you, you're doing jobs for under bid. That's my only concern. So I would, I would, I would question as to why you have excess capacity right now that could handle 150 customers. Like you have a lot of excess capacity right now. So I don't know if you bought a couple trucks. Like great, fantastic. Whatever you did, you have a lot of excess capacity right now. And I usually.

You don't want to plan on how many customers you're going to have. Like you don't know exactly how many customers are going to come, but what you know is when you hit capacity, you will raise prices. So I'd rather have like say one truck that gives me 50 or 60 new mode customers and then I know I need to buy another truck because I know with less, with more confidence you'll hit 50 or 60 million customers than 100 to 150. And so you have a lot of excess capacity. I think it's right to like sell that. And then I would just. Yeah, in, in the perfect world, you still have three, four weeks left of tons of leads pouring in to give you more confidence on raising your prices.

So.

Would June be too late? Yeah, it just simply comes to hitting capacity. Right. So if you have 100 to 150ish mowing customers, it means you probably have two to three trucks that are basically doing nothing otherwise like right now. Or this is your new location where you've already got the trucks and you're ready to roll. Fantastic. Let's get to the 100 customers as soon as possible. Like that. That's all it comes down to. And knowing what that budget hours is, the actual budget hours would be the main thing. And then tracking it every single day.

Brian Connor this question comes from a coaching call. All right.

If a franchisee start wants to start P4P once I'm going to check everything is running.

How do you recommend setting up the P4P software to run P4P in the background? Do we set up the employee accounts and just have the email come directly to the franchisee? For context, this location currently has four team members. The base pay is $17 per hour and the hourly is 70. Please give some advice on how to best begin the P2P rollout. Yeah, so you can put the cut the employees.

Email in there just like normal. Just don't send them daily reports. So if you're trying to send do this in the background. Just don't click the button that says send reports. And then also if they don't have the app on their phone, they will not get push notifications. So you shouldn't really have to worry about this. You can still put their information in and then that way if you wanted to sync wanted to sync it up with Copilot, you still could to bring all the data over and save yourself from time every day. You could do that.

And then just don't click send reports and if they don't have the app, they won't get push notifications. So.

You should be good to go there. In terms of the P4P integration next week it's going to be much better because it's going to consolidate every single visit that has the same rate. So for example, right now we have it where basically you see almost every job inside the P4P time card and it's just kind of messy. What it's going to do starting next week is consolidate. So for example, if you have all of your mowing jobs at 80 per hour is your rate, it'll consolidate all of those, add up all their budget hours and put as one record inside of the PPP time time card which will save a ton of time or just a little cleaner I should say. But the reason we've waited on that is because we didn't want it to just be like where you're always second guessing or like trying to recalculate the numbers. So what it's going to have next week is when it consolidates a bunch of jobs, you're going to be able to hover over and see all the customers names that are in Copilot that are included inside of that consolidation. So there'll be a video training coming on it next week, but it'll improve it a lot and just make it look cleaner because right now it's just, it's messy. It brings the information over, but it's a little bit messy. I just watched your video on staying away from time plus material jobs. For those of us doing sprinkler repair, what do you recommend? Sprinkler pair is I would say is somewhat of an anomaly mostly because is so like anything that is buried, you almost need to do some sort of hourly clause because you can't actually assess the thing. Right. Especially on the initial visit. Right. So I'm a big fan and your sprinkler repair. But like hey, the first we're going to come out, we're going to assess things that cost you 150 bucks per hour and after that we will give you an estimate that makes more sense to me because anything that's buried you cannot give a price that's accurate at all. Right. So same Thing that happens, excavation, they will give a price, and then they'll basically say that, look, if we hit a massive rock or all of a sudden the soil type changes, we're going to change the bed. And so anything that you can't see. And I should have made it more clear in that video, if you can't see it and it takes you getting into the. Into the job before you actually know what the job is going to be, that's different. However, when it comes to sprinkler repair, I'm a big fan. Like, hey, here's your first visit. It's going to cost you 125 bucks or $150 per hour. And then we will assess the damage or whatever it is, and then we will give you a bid based upon that. Right. Like, if you're installing a new sprinkler system, that one you should be able to, in my opinion, give a set price on, because you're only digging down, like, a foot. So before you give the. If you're worried about, like, there being rock, okay, dig a little hole. Make sure there's no rock down there. You're only going down a foot or two, so it's not a big deal. And then you should be able to give an actual price. It's like, fully encompassing, like a bid for the job. But if anything's buried, you almost have to do that clause. At least a clause. If not actually charging by the hour. So, Maddie cox from Cornelius, North Carolina. Let's go.

Did I start my 3F program as soon as I'm qualified, or should I wait? Put back as much as possible, and when I have enough put back to be able to throw as much as possible into a new location. Okay, I see. I see.

I think it would really come down to where in two years in terms of growing a location. I'm going to talk to you inside the computer.

One second. All right, now I can hear you. Cool. So I think here, let's do this. Since Maddie is in the room, we're just going to flip this thing around. There we go. Okay, here we go.

Boom, boom, boom. Let's see if this can actually work. This cord might pop out, and then we're toast. Come on. Oh, yeah. Come on up, Maddie. Let's go. All right, much better, Much better. Okay. This is Maddie. She's general manager at Cornelis, North Carolina location. So I would probably say, like, after two years, if you're like, you kind of like the current size of the business, then it'd be like, how much money do I need to get this location as quickly as possible to this. So say, for example, you have, let's just call it three employees and you're doing 450, 500,000 in revenue in two years at the Cornelius location. You're like, I like this. Okay, great. That means I'm going to need to go buy these amount of trucks. I'm going to need X amount to probably do marketing and I'm going to need some working capital because the first year I know that I'm probably not going to be very profitable. So then you can kind of make your own budget. Now if you're like, hey, I like this whole like two or three employee thing, but I don't want to be in the field anymore. You're probably going to need more like five or six employees before you're working on the business instead of in it. Well, now it might be a matter of, okay, let me keep doing this GM thing, right? Make 100, $110,000, do it for say, five years. But now I come out with 150 grand sitting in my bank, ready to go. Really attack and get say four or five trucks, several more employees, et cetera. It really just comes down to like, what do you like? And you'll probably only know that after two years and like, whether or not you like that size or you want to go bigger. So any other follow up questions instead of just standing.

Okay. Oh, really? Cool. Thanks so much. I appreciate it, Manny. Cool. All right, let's see here if any other questions came in.

Let's go.

Cool. All right, I think that's it. I will have a pretty cool update I'm working on this weekend. I just need a little time to put together a video for everyone. Like I said, I ran it by the franchise advisor council and got the green lights on it. So I think everyone will be pretty happy with it. And really it's just a cool thing. So I'm looking forward to going to share that with you. If not tomorrow, probably Monday. I will get it.

Did that. Exactly what Connor said.

That's hilarious. Of the four people who have done that for two stayed longer than the two year minimum. Two left right at two years. Got it. Very cool. All right, everyone have a fantastic Friday, a great weekend, and we'll stay in touch. Take care.