Mike Minutes Mastermind 03/20/24

And we're live. Sorry, when I say that, I'm literally reading what's on the screen here. So. Hello, everyone. Sorry, I'm a little bit later than usual for the day. Bit of a crazy morning.

Let's go and get started. I canceled the trip for this week. Fantastic. So I feel like I got two days back in my life. All right, I got several announcements. Let me make sure I get this link in here first, though.

Facebook.

Okay. See here we got six questions. Very good. Let me just make sure this goes into Facebook 20. Cool. All right, I have announcements. Let's go through them.

First one.

On some of the locations this morning for about 40 to 60 minutes, Max was. Ringcentral was not taking Max things. So when Max was handed off during Central, it would take it back to Max. They fixed it. Hasn't been a problem since. It's the first time we've really ever had a problem with that. But Ringcentral was kicking it back, so I apologize for that. So in case any customers say they couldn't get past Max, it happened today for about 40 to 60 seconds.

But that's been resolved. Second thing.

I will post this on the Facebook group when this is 100% ready to go. But this is what.

Is going to look like.

When it comes to adding square footage as an option to your instant quote form. So this, again, is optional completely, and you'll be able to customize these square footages inside of the dashboard. So I will make a comment, if not this evening, first thing in the morning on the Facebook group and notify everyone that this is live. Again, completely optional, and you do not need to do anything if you just don't want to have it being shown at all. Why that isn't going away, I don't know.

Okay, next up. All right, this one I can do. Share.

Probably such a weirdo when I'm looking at my screen, looking all over the place at this stuff. Okay, dashboard on here. There's a new spot I'm going to show everyone. For forms, you go to Academy and you go to Forms. There's one called Command Center Feedback. Okay, so the reason I'm doing this is because I looked at the data this morning and there was. There you go. Thank you.

In the month of March, there were 74 yellow slips submitted. Thirteen of them were valid mistakes from Command center that were refunded. Oh, I was going to show the whole thing one second. And what that tells me is not that Command center is that good, because I know they're not. What it Is is I know that some people get frustrated and they don't submit yellow slips. So we want to make it easier if you do not want to submit yellow slips to give feedback. Give me one second. I'm trying to find a document that I wanted to share in doing saying this, which I should have had ready, but I didn't. Okay, here we go. So this is just a quick example or showing exactly what actually is using at command center of what they do when there is a yellow slip. Well, share this tab. All right. So what happens is they have which representative so we can track exactly who it was and what the problem was or who it was, I should say. And they have a drop down for every team member at command center. The. The location, the amount of minutes that we gotta. We gotta refund the person, the client's name, what happened. The resolution. We have certain error codes to be able to track that over time to see if people need retraining or if the whole team needs retraining and the date that it was inputted. So you can see here. So this one's pretty bad. Huntersville for that team member for that customer agent formatted and sent out a revised quote Work order change which client accepted. GM noticed the price was incorrect resolution. GM asked CC to call. We'll make sure I'm sharing all this before I just keep talking. There you go. GM called CC to call and explain the price was not correct but client did not want to pay the adjusted price. He accepted the quote that was sent and wanted us to honor that price. We will honor that price and command center will refund the location the difference to ensure the crew is paid correctly. And this was error. COD was estimated formatted priced incorrectly date November 24th so every single one is very detailed. I looked at it for the first time in probably six months in terms of how this process works. Every single one is detailed, gone through and then if there are for example copilot issue, we still consider that a mistake and we will refund people. If like for example, something didn't go through because copilot had an issue and your estimate went out incorrect. We're still honoring those. So that's how yellow slips are handled. However, however. However. However. I know that sometimes it's just like I just don't want to smell yellow slip. Great. I want you still to be able to give feedback and feel heard. So what are we doing? I'm opening up this tab to share this page. So from here, if you ever have feedback, you are more than welcome to Share it with us. Because 74 yellow slips have been submitted so far in March. Thirteen of them were actually mistakes by Command center. The other 61 of them or whatever was given detailed information as to why it was not a Command center issue. It could have been the customer gave us the wrong information, they gave us the wrong address, whatever, or in some way it was not Command Center's fault. But they give very detailed explanations to why. And I looked through that.

But you can also, because that's very quantitative. Like, from my perspective, if Command center can do thousands of touches a day, like potentially tens of thousands of touches a day to accounts and only make a few mistakes, that's a positive thing. But what I want to be able to do is if you're not submitting yellows because you're just frustrated, just to be able to have to be able to give feedback. So again, forms Command center feedback and you can submit your feedback right here. All right, So I just asked you to be as detailed as possible. If you're just going to complain, I can't help you very much. And Command center can't help you very much. If you give detailed information as to what happened and you know, where you think things went wrong or something like that. They're going to reach out to you, they're going to want to set up a call, they're going to want to, they'll give you feedback. And ultimately, you know, I'd say it's one out of 50, one out of 40 times. It's just like, hey, look, that's just not going to work at Command Center. Not because it's bad. Oops, sorry, I'm not sharing my tab. This is the form. Not because it's bad the way you're doing it, simply just a matter of like, we gotta standardize it. And I think for the probably the first 50 locations, we allowed a lot of variety at Command Center. And as we crossed 100, we really had to start cracking down. Like, we gotta follow certain systems, otherwise it's just gonna become a mess. And so there might be occasional times like, hey, this won't work inside this, the current framework. Because if you're the only one out of 150 locations that does it. We aren't going to be able to pass our 99% efficiency rule, which is like we, our goal is always like 99% of the time we hit it. Because we're humans, we're going to have some degree of error. And so if, if they feel like based upon them digging into your Account digging into everything that they can see based upon your feedback. They might be like, hey, this, this specific service, we think you should handle yourself. Like, hey, we keep messing up invoicing. Here's why we think it is happening. And instead of us trying to keep fumbling along, we think you should probably take invoicing back so you can submit the feedback here. And there's only two very good things that can come of this. Number one. Number one would be that Command center gets enough feedback between the Yellow Slip system and these forms to be able to improve. Right now, there's not a lot of feedback. 13 mistakes in a month doesn't give me any sort of trend or pattern. I should say the yellow Slip system.

Yellow slip department, much of a trend to be able to make improvements.

Even if 13 valid mistakes were made by one person in a month, if they were doing four or five hundred touches to accounts every single day, it's not so bad. We're now open seven days a week. So I know that there are more mistakes being made. We know that there's two, but we want to make sure those things are being shared. The major thing I always think about, I don't want you frustrated because you feel trapped or you feel like you're not sharing what your thoughts are. And then when there's a trend, when there's something that we can see, like for example, a team member that constantly is making the mistakes, that's why it's tracked based upon team member. That's why it's tracked based on error code to like, do we need to retrain people, like the whole team? If it's the same error code happening all the time, is it the same one or two people making a lot of the mistakes? Same thing. So all of that to say, I want to make sure that you are heard, you feel like you're being heard, and at the very worst, you're given a reason as to why Command center can't do it exactly the way you want. And I understand no one wants to hear that because most of us have a very simple way of doing it. And it's like. It's just. It's different but simple. I understand. But by adding differences across 150 locations, even 1 degree of error or degree of change would cause like infinite numbers of possibilities for Command center to fail in. So we're trying our best to limit that. And.

The biggest one we've removed is having to CRMs, obviously with copilot being the way it is currently with the bugs that has been Greatly diminished because it's such a pain in the butt. But I do believe that that will be the number one way for us to reduce the other stuff is just reducing human error in that regard. So we're always looking for ways to do that. But in order to do that, we have to reduce degrees of error. So I know, for example, that by having us having what was for a while, three CRMs, I tripled just immediately by having that one degree of change, one degree of change inside the whole system, I tripled the amount of human error. Then if instead of say estimates, we say, well, there's three different ways you can do different estimates based upon X, Y and Z. There's four different ways to do this other thing. You just are adding more and more layers where things can go wrong. And if we had allow 150 different ways of doing something, we're talking about thousands and thousands of ways. We're just like throwing a minefield for command center to get through. And it's not fair to them because they really do take it personally when they get a yellowsip, they hear about it, they get everything broken down, they get it docked from their pay and it's not fair to them. So all of that to say that form is there for feedback. Thank you very much.

I did that one already. All right, one last thing. This will also, if not tonight, tomorrow be completed and that is.

This. I'm just gonna pull up a random P for P screenshot. So right now, inside of the P4P Copa integration, every single job gets pulled up as basically a separate kind of time card. Annoying as I'll get out what it's going to do if not today, tomorrow is anytime the rate is the same and it matches the number of crew.

It'S going to combine them, consolidate them, and then there's going to be a little tool tip right here that you're going to be able to toggle over and see all the customers names pulled from copilot with the number of budget hours for each one as a dropdown. So you'll be able to really still be able to see each job and how number budget hours. But what you won't have to deal with is this long time card that's annoying as I'll get out. So I really want to make this integration as simple as possible. And right now with all those entries for every single stop, it just is long, complicated and annoying. The vast majority of us have the one or two rates, so we don't need tons of information on the time car. It can consolidate all based upon the rate and then have the icon where if you want to toggle over it, you can see which ones were pools from COPA and match them up. So that'll be really helpful. With that integration turned on, your crew inside P4P can see the thermometer and their expected daily wages and I just genuinely believe them. Seeing how much they can earn for the day will get them to push to an extra one or two jobs, especially at the end of the day. And they'll start to see the fact like they're second half of their day is where all their P4P is made. Because the first half of the day they're trying to make up for the first hour of like load time and getting the first property like their blades turning. And they'll start to see like, well, my hourly rate goes up. As I do more and more jobs, their hourly rate goes up. So I really want to be able to make that happen.

I think it'll lead to a lot of efficiencies.

All right, that is for announcements. Let's go to questions. So what's my time like? Okay.

What is it? There you go, Mike Minutes Mastermind.

Seven. All right, here we go. Numero Uno Joel from Lafayette, Colorado Avesta CoPilot feature Request Would it be possible to add an option to items and services in Copilot that would enable.

When that when enabled, prevents any user from creating a new item or service anywhere in the application or a setting in preferences to hide or disable the new plus buttons? Even with the recent changes to prevent duplicate items and services, I got two new duplicate property service items. I can't figure out where they came from and found a bug that created duplicate services when creating a package.

I see. I also have a couple instances of a user creating new service items with the name of a package instead of adding the package.

For regular Copilot users who have one or two people working the account, this probably isn't a big deal. With cc, my GM and me handling estimates, scheduling and invoices, it increases the probability of creating a new service by mistake. It would be great if Copilot had additional guardrails around service item creation for accounts that have many active admin users.

Cool. So I'm glad you submitted the bug report. So basically you're saying there's a way around the plus button and that is basically creating it inside of a package. That makes sense. It's treating package items and services differently than the regular ones. So it's still allowing you that Makes sense to me. The other parts there.

I think some of this could be done by. Oh, I see you have multiple admin users. I was going to say the user roles and rights, but if you have multiple admins, they're going to be able to see it all. Um, I wonder if you wanted to, Joel, in the meantime, is potentially end user roles and rights being able to block certain pages for them to get in there that are causing those. But again, if you're wanting from the mobile app to be able to do things on a certain page, they have to see it. Right. So yeah, at least this one like that. We shouldn't be treating packages, package items and services differently and allow that around the plus button and then down the road I think we can look at seeing. Okay, where else can they get around that and potentially just eliminate them completely?

Nick from Marysville, this is an Ask before how strict would you be on bi weekly modes during spring? If we know for a fact we can't hit budget hours no matter what? We have a couple. Well, that's the kicker. We have a couple clients that joined after a weekly requirement last year and are very serious about not having weekly in the spring. I have always been extremely firm. I'll probably price increase them first when we hit capacity, but until then, is there any harm in letting them be bi weekly? Can you explain how this worked at Bellingham? Because I know we were still doing bi weeklies in the spring back then and we made it work. Yeah, like as long as you are pricing someone so much that their budget hours for bi weekly is like exorbitant, you're good. It's just, it's really a matter of like making the requirement. Should really be only if you know that like 60 to 70% of your lawns are going to be like triple the budget hours, not 50 more. Triple the amount of time to take it. If you let them go two weeks and like in our market, like I would say 40 to 50 of lawns at least. If you let them go bi weekly during especially April and May, it would literally be a foot and a half tall, like a foot at least. And that would not just be a marginal increase in time, like 50, it would be a tripling and you would fill the entire truck with debris. So if you were to bag in clippings, also less inclined to actually care about requiring weekly because you go maybe a little bit slower and yes, there's more wear and tear on the mower, but you're willing to take the 50% extra BI weekly Be super thrilled when you're bagging, that's when you want to start thinking about it. Because if it requires your crew to come back to the job, back to the shop, just to dump all their clippings, then you got a problem like in the middle of the middle of a route. So. But if you know that that specific lawn doesn't grow like crazy, you can crush the budget hours no matter what. You could one off it until you hit capacity. As long as you're willing to just kind of know what the lawns are like. I wouldn't do that like over the phone because again there are lawns in your market specifically Nick that in April and May, you know, like if they go two weeks it is a foot and a half so but if these, these silent customers, they already had them, you know, you're good to go. I would hit capacity and then maybe make more requirements around this stuff or price increase based upon this because hitting capacity then you have just unlocked so many more options and you get way more confidence around what requirements you're going to have.

Tim, are tags such as gate, reminder and poop removal working yet?

I'm not sure what you mean. I'm guessing you mean for automations. I use them for these 3M text messages. That's why I use tags. So I would imagine they're doing. They're fine. You can look inside, you always ask ATC too and see if there was specific something like bug that you submitted.

And if there is then you could be put it at your email on that specific bug. But I use tags for these to filter down and to know the automations. Nick Napin, do you have a contact with Facebook business support? My ad account has hacked so I currently don't have access to my business Facebook page or ad account. This has been ongoing for months and they can't seem to get fixed for me any. That's horrible dude. I would start a new account. Honestly, the Facebook and Google are brutal at support.

Brutal. So I have seen.

I don't know if I did this or not. Like so I'm talking like five years ago when I first started doing social media stuff. I believe I started a secondary account because of the same thing. I did an ad someone probably flagged or something. They took my whole thing down and I had to start a new account.

I would probably do that and then if they ever got it back up eventually I would try to migrate everything over or like tell them hey, I had to create a duplicate. Can I bring my reviews over or something. Like that. But. But I do not have a contact of business support. I don't even know if they have a business support. It's like more of a ticketing system. So.

Garrett from Glendale, Colorado. Number one. Number two. And nothing. Okay, great. Number one. I just. I wanted to say thank you for your advice. I submitted a question headed into this previous winter about whether or not we should take on landscape projects and advertising the winter. I took your advice and it made all the difference. Last winter I twiddled my thumbs and we lost about 30k in the winter through mid April this year we lost. We should be closer to a 5k loss. Adding snow definitely helped too. We could afford to spend a higher winter CAC by going after jobs between 2 to $10,000. If a job is 10k theoretically we can afford to spend 1k on ads to get that one client's job. So thank you so much. You changed the trajectory of the business with just a few minutes of advice. Good you're here. Thank you. 2. We just raised all future work for mowing and projects to 120 per hour. Very good. And drastically reduced service area. Essentially increased our mowing matrix by 50 across the board. All initial milling and weeding pooling are at 199 per minute per man. Just this morning got a 30 budget hour job accepted at 120 per hour. Which is breaking down my self limiting beliefs. Let's go.

I love it. I love it. My question is we aren't scheduling any projects besides urgent cleanups and recurring until things slow down in August. We are still booked out a month. Should I adjust my services offered and have command center not schedule any estimates besides urgent cleanups and mowing? Or should I still take on the estimates, collect 50% deposits and start booking up August with non cleanup projects? Rock sod mulch. There's no reason not to do what you said in the latter. Which is collect the 50% get the jobs. Unless customers don't want it, Right? Like if you're in that high demand, just go for it. The worst thing they can say is no. And if I remember correctly, you don't want to keep growing, you don't want more employees, you don't want another truck, et cetera. Because if you're making 120 bucks an hour and you're booked out this far and you're not even in spring rush, most people would want to grow if you don't want to. Kudos to you. Let's go. You're going to make this thing super profitable. I Would not hesitate from like making some sort of thing. Like if you get to six, but six weeks out, okay, now it's 150 an hour, 180 an hour. Whatever it is, just keep stepping it up as you get booked out further, right? Just don't, just don't get greedy where you're like at four out, four weeks, I'm going to book up to 200 an hour because then what happened? You can burn through four weeks of work pretty quickly at the end of spring rush. So just be careful of that because if you're booking out eight weeks from now, in eight weeks, you might need the work, right? So just, just keep that in mind. But unless people are saying no because you're booked out too far, keep booking out. I've seen people book out projects for five, six months into the future, like big hardscaping jobs, 12, 18 months. So I know again, like it's a self belief limiting belief of my own because I thought the same thing back then. It's like, like, oh, people are gonna wait for their, you know, a project for a month or two. Like, well, yeah, until I'm booked out so much I don't need the work and they're willing to still accept it. So.

Oh, we already did this one.

Garrett from Glendale, again, can you get more specific as to what is considered urgent in terms of project work that we should schedule during spring rush? I would consider pulling weeds, trimming bushes, cleaning up leaves. But would you also include mulch, install refresh as urgent or should this be scheduled for August? What other services am I not thinking of? It really depends, like how specific you want to get. Right. Like I would say it's not about urgency as time sensitivity. Like you can't push off pulling weeds for eight weeks. You just can't. It's going to be completely overgrown. The job's going to triple in size. Same thing with like spring cleanups for existing customers, right? So I would probably prioritize my existing customers for services that can't be pushed off. And you nailed most of them. The mulch install ones. That one, I would just be like, maybe I don't get them. I'd try to get them. Like, I'd do my estimates, I'd send out the quotes and I'd schedule them in the future. But people don't accept. I don't really care. I'm going to fill that time no matter what. Again, if you're hitting capacity and you're confident you can fill the fill your schedule, fill 2 capacity and book out further in the future without a specific service, why offer it? If you're charging $120 per hour for mulch and you're hurting 120 an hour for pulling weeds, who cares what service is on there as long as you're booked out, right? If you're not booked out, that's when it's like, well, why are you pushing off projects like put them on tomorrow. But if you know you're going to hit capacity and you're booked out into the future, that's when it's like put them in. Ask them, hey, I can do your multisol in five, six weeks or whenever you're putting them on the schedule. I would probably do that. I would not be like I'm going to put you in August. Now if it's, if it's a certain type of project that you know you can do in August, I'd probably potentially put them out there further. But something like mulch, most people aren't going to wait two months on like a mulch refresh. Hey, give it a shot.

Mr. Anonymous, do we have any data on what is working really well in terms of marketing this year so far? No. I usually don't make a call on it until at least halfway to Spring Rush. If you're looking for Facebook ads specifically at the top there's a pinned post from Joel has a Google Drive that he's sharing which Facebook ads are working well and people are collaborating there. Feel free to look at that. We have some more.

Every door, direct mail and door hangers coming out specifically around getting instant quote 24. 7 phone calls etc.

So.

Nothing yet to answer your question. I'm like super definitive on because like even seasonality of our markets can like sway by three to four weeks. I've seen Spring Rush like data.

Does CC explain to potential clients the price per minute on the initial mowing service? I know it states on the estimates but people, most people just don't read like to read. So I was wondering if CC mentions that to them or is it the first time they see an estimate? Nope, they explain it every single time when they're doing OTP and we do it after we give them the prices for weekly and bi weekly so it doesn't confuse them because usually once they accept the weekly they're just willing to like you know, they're going to be like, yes, fantastic, great. Like I don't want to explain the dollar per minute per man or $2 per minute per man up front. We get the price accepted. Okay, yeah, we Dream you weekly. Fantastic. We'll get this in over the scheduler. That first visit is going to be X amount per minute per man. And that's just in case it's overgrown. Make sure we get dialed in after that. It's gonna be that same 40 per cut. So every OTP that is being stated on. Yeah.

Obviously, if it's. I was about to say if it's instant quote on the website, you make sure it's in your.

Verbiage down below. I was looking the other day, almost all of Augusta Nation has instant quotes now. That's pretty cool. And then this new. This new thing that should be done, if not in the next couple hours tomorrow morning it will be for the square footage. That'll be an option as well. And I'll. I'll put a.

A post inside the Facebook group. Basically, you'll just go to the same place, edit your web page and if you want to add something, if it's brand new, you do add something. Or you can do change something. If you already have your instant quote and you just want to add the square footage in there, either way would work. All right, everyone, have a fantastic rest of your evening. We'll see you tomorrow.