Mike Minutes Mastermind 03/22/2023

What's up, Destination. Hope you're all doing well. Gonna get things kicked off and turn my volume up here attached. Let me copy this link in. Get started a couple announcements.

Really quickly. Before we get started, let me just copy this into the playlist.

Sorry, I always have to do this. If I don't do this though, it doesn't go into the playlist and it doesn't go on Facebook correctly. So I can only do it once. We're live. All right, we're off to the races. Couple announcements. First one is.

Roundtable is going to be the April 13, right? So it's still a few weeks away. I will send this out via email as an invite for everyone on Zoom. I'll also put this on Facebook. April 13, 5pm Pacific Time. It is 8pm Eastern Standard Time, so everyone get their day done. We will have the next roundtable. Looking forward to that.

End of day Friday, end of this week, we will have the updated done for you ads for Google and it'll walk you through the process. When you're done. Performance max and search ads again, that's gonna be done by the agency. And then this weekend I will present their options for management, which is if you don't want to do anything, have anything with your ads, they can manage the ads for you. They do like 40 different campaigns. They'll be cycling things through, giving you reports, the whole nine yards.

And if you don't want to use them, you can just use the done for you ads videos and do them yourself and then manage them yourself. So I'm really looking forward to it because like I said before, I do not spend 12, 14 hours a day looking at Google, nor do our coaches. So when they're changing as much as they have been recently, we are much happier to hand this off to Dump for you guys as someone that's going to do this much, much better for us. And the only reason they're doing it for free for Dump for you guys is because all of Augusta Nations, I'm super happy about that. And then if you don't want to have anything to do with it and they can manage it for you, they can do that for a fee. And I'll go over all those fees and how that all works this weekend they have a document specifically for us. They're waiving a whole bunch of $800 in the initial. Like there's a bunch of good stuff. So looking forward to sharing that. But the done few ads that they're recording for us they said will be done Friday. So Unless there's delay on their end, they said Friday that will be ready to go. I am going to be having them manage my locations. The new ones out in Mooresville or like North Carolina, not Mooresville, sorry, just North Carolina. Mooresville's profit mode. So we're not doing it, but they're going to manage mine. So that way I can with first hand experience tell you guys how the management side of things goes. And I know for a fact though that the done view ads will be at least 10 to 20% better than what I've done just because I'm not in it every single day. And so it's gonna be a big win for all of us, I think. Last thing I know I mentioned a little bit yesterday, but mowing service templates. Tomorrow I'm gonna share what I recommend to be your verbiage on your estimates for mowing. I've seen too many variations and people adding way too much verbiage, too many notes like this is lawn care. We got to keep this simple folks. We've got to cover our butt. But we got, we got to keep it simple. And so I'm going to give my recommendations that has everything that we need in there in terms of covering your butt if it's overgrown your initial MO, etc. I'm just seeing people adding way too much stuff. They're putting the, the prices up above, they're doing multiple notes inside of the. It's becoming massive. So I'm going to recommend what we're going to use at my locations and then you can obviously edit and modify however you want and then it'd be up to you if you want to change it inside of your account or have command center to do it for you if you want. But tomorrow I will share that because I'm seeing too much divergence away from simplicity, easy to read customers, being able to understand what you're trying to say and get the gist of weekly, bi weekly and initial the. That's like all we're trying to convey. All the other stuff is too jumbled up. You're going to reduce your close ratio so you don't have to change it. But I'm going to give my recommendation tomorrow what you should be doing. I've seen about probably 15 in the past week and they're all over the place. And I get it, you start adding oh, I want to add this extra note in there. Oh, and add this extra clause or like, you know, fine print, you can get too carried away with it within a year if you keep doing that, it's all over the place. And I've seen that. So that will kill your close ratio because they will not understand what they're getting in their email. So. All right.

That'S all I had for announcements. Let's jump into questions.

Present Share screen.

All right, and we're live. Chad from Valparaiso, Indiana. He might. I have several customers that need significant price increases. My concern that I'm trying to grow and raising their prices would hinder my growth if I lose them. But at the same time, I have my first employee starting a season. I don't want to lose money on these properties. What would you suggest? I would suggest growing to capacity. So if you have one employee and you have one truck, you could probably get to.

15, 16,000amonth in revenue before you're going to, like, need another truck. The question is, do you get another truck and keep expanding or do you take that time raise prices? You're probably not going to lose as many customers as you think. But let's say you do.

Probably during spring rush. If you're hit capacity, it'll probably take you a few weeks to recoup those customers in the form of new customers once you've lost some of them. So that would be my recommendation. Just grow into the point where you're like, okay, if I get any more customers, I will have to buy more trucks or hire more employees. Therefore, I'm going to raise prices to increase profit margins and cut some of these people out. And you actually are hoping that some of them leave. And trust me, this happens all the time when you're. Especially when you're cutting during spring rush, when you're raising prices and potentially cutting customers, they can't find anyone else to do their service. They're just going to stick with you. So that's a good thing because now that price increase at capacity gives you the confidence to go get the other truck, hire another person, etc. I would always grow to capacity and then raise prices. And if you do that during spring rush, you likely will not lose as many customers as you think, even if it's significant.

Is this how command center measures the properties? If so, I think I'm going to adjust my calculator because it's only 1200 square feet of grass. They calculated 2150. All right, let's see what we got here. Share this tab instead.

Yeah, so when we are on the phone, we are going to measure properties all in one block because otherwise you have to do multiple polygons. But more Importantly, the reason that they would do this this way is because they know that your square footage price isn't going to hit your minimum. So when, when we go into a property we can almost visually see it's not going to hit your minimum price, which for the vast majority of us is like 4 to 6,000 square feet. There's no point in trying to get all these little squares in here. We're just going to waste time, basically. So that's. You're just simply going to. Yeah, like waste time when you could save extra 10 seconds by just telling the customer right off the bat. Okay, we're your minimum. So I'm assuming you drop these pins to kind of see what the square footage is, but that's what's happening.

And two, just keep in mind it would actually be faster to do that lawn at 2100 square feet without the sidewalks and everything. Then them adding the extra square footage in by taking out the the sidewalks. So when there's like those little pieces of lawn guarantee you it takes you longer to mow the grass as it is on that property than if it was as they would had measured it at 2100 square feet. So yeah, if they know right off the bat, like we look at the property, okay, this is like a few thousand square feet and their minimum is 4 or 5,000 square feet. We're going to quickly do it to make sure, but we're not going to spend time trying to cut out four different polygons, adding up the different.

Shapes, etc.

Thoughts? What are my thoughts? My thoughts are that we need a question. Let's see here.

This is pretty good. Yeah. So again, like I said, tomorrow I will have my recommendations of what you should be putting in here and then you can modify it. This looks pretty good though because you have your initial M.O. you have your weekly and your bi weekly bolded. It's very simple. Cancel out of this. Yeah, there's other people that do have other verbiage. For example, certain months of the year that are required. I like the fact that this is here. So some people put that up top here. You do as well. It looks like right here, 24 hour note, which is good. So I think this is good. It's pretty easy to follow.

So.

I don't think this is needed personally, but that's just me.

Yeah, I'll give my recommendation tomorrow what I would recommend for mowing. Obviously you guys can customize it as you would like, but yeah.

The reason I say that that one do not need is because like you end up having weird verbiage like includes front, back and both sides of the lawn or includes like it'd just be easier if there was something negated. Just to say doesn't include the left side of the house. Right? Then saying includes backyard, right side of house and includes the front yard, but not the left side. Like you're getting too confusing. So you just want to keep it as simple as possible. Oh, force is on a tear. Forrest, how come my Tracy can't let you choose what to optimize your route with and Modesto? Doesn't Tracy seem to work way better than Modesto account? Okay, I'm guessing the service autopilot issue. Okay, so let me share. Oh, you guys can't see what I'm looking at. Sec. Sorry.

I don't know how far back you guys are missing. Sorry. This one, he's asking about.

That one and.

This one. So you have Maps Pro on one of your accounts and you don't have Maps Pro on another one. So Maps Pro allows you to have unlimited route optimizations and it's included for $50 a month. The other account that you just showed me, you have credits and you do not have Maps Pro would be my my guess. So that's why.

Cool.

Sorry, I hope I wasn't not sharing my screen for too long there.

All right, next one. Thomas I'm guessing Salazar following yesterday's one day jobs. Oh yeah, this is a great question. So on the Facebook group Thomas, I think Connor clarify and gave me a good example of when this would happen. Let's go and read yours. Follow up with yesterday's one day jobs and allocating bvp. You asked for examples of why one member on the job or team. We have different times for only one day jobs. Owner or GM shows up in the job for a fraction of time. They work training, assisting, then leaving to perform other jobs like estimates, phone calls, emails, calls, etc. One of the team two One of the team members is on the job for only a fraction of the time, showed up late, had to stop during work and make a personal long personal phone call, goes to the bathroom a lot, et cetera. 3. One of the team members does not want to take a lunch or breaks but the other does so second and third one for example.

Those ones like for example that would just be them on P4P clocking a break and then if you really wanted like if it's a substantial like you know, hour or whatever, you could then just see that in the time cards that they have way less time clocked and then just allocate less hours towards that job. The one, the first one is the one that is big deal. But let me continue. I have been explaining to the team be sure to clock out in the jobs, for example such as these so that other team members do not lose PvP. It was explained to me that one day job PvP will be divided evenly amongst the team members assigned. How can I ensure that we are doing things properly? So the high performers are rewarded for their efforts in these examples. Thanks for clarification. Yeah, so 2 and 3, I would recommend they clock out on a break if that isn't happening and if someone's like doing this a lot and they're like a low performer, you're going to get them smoked out pretty quick by the high performers that are not wanting them to do this. So I would say that a little bit about this one. But if you're doing a long lunch break for example and someone doesn't want to, I would have them clock out as a break on P4P app. You would then see that they have less time clocked and then you would allocate less hours on that project.

Oh, this is not project. I keep thinking multi day project.

You could assign less budget hours to the cruise, right? So for example, if you want to, let's say it's a 16 budget hour job. What you could do instead of making one time card with two crew members, you could do like nine budget hours assigned to one person and seven assigned to the other person. You could do that and just not do a one time card. So that'd be the probably the best way to do it. Same thing like if an owner shows up, like if you're going and showing up for the job etc. I would probably just take okay, if you're there two hours, let's take an hour and a half of budget hours off of the of their that job. Because again we're talking about jobs like 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 budget hours, right. So it's going to be small enough to where you could just be able to calibrate it on their time cards. It shouldn't be that big of a deal because this is not a massive project or tons of customers etc. So.

Plantation, is there a way we can add landscaping to my Google my business when searching landscaping near me or I put my city name I'm already found. Please Google landscaping and Plantation or Sunrise. Yeah, so you'll need to go to your Google listing account and add that as a Service and add other services around landscaping. Right? So trees, bark, mulch, installing rock and gravel. They have tons of services now. It's not just like landscaping and lawn care. There's a whole bunch. Definitely feel free to go in there and add those. I would recommend every couple weeks everyone checking their Google listings because now it's open source and it allows customers to add things in for you and it gets messed up pretty quick. So definitely feel free to go in your Google listing account and do that.

Next, hardwood from Burnaby. Does copilot have a potential conflict of interest? In the future, Copilot will be used by Augusta, but it'll also be used by non Augusta locations. This will allow us to have intimate knowledge about the businesses it is competing with and increase its own competitive advantage. By imitating effective by imitating effective marketing materials. By imitating effective marketing.

By imitating effective marketing materials sent through copilot or operational strategies displayed in copilot. To take an example, it would be like Nike building a CRM for shoe manufacturers. What do you think of this?

Yeah, like obviously it gives us a lot of data.

And I've just been honest with people. Like look, if you don't trust me to with your data and you think I'm going to use it against you or like give it to franchisees locally to your location, then don't use copilot. That's like all I can say. And so yeah, there's gonna be like probably 10% of people that are like afraid of that. And that's, that's fine.

And honestly like the whole goal here is to change level, professionalism, industry, whether that is Augusta, Copilot, everything is long term media.

The media team, home service, web design, home service, epa, all of that. And so if people don't buy into that vision then yeah, they would probably think that I'm going to take their data and take all their card information. Like we literally have the card information for every customer, not just our users, but the customers, we have that data. And so yeah, I'm open and honest about that and I'll tell them and.

If they think there's a conflict, that's fine. The goal would be that it becomes so much better than the competition that they have to either take that risk or.

Take an inferior product. And so that would be the goal. That's all I really care about. And.

I say something else and I forget increase zone families. But yeah, it gives us, it gives us like a big advantage. We have a lot of data in terms of placing locations. I'd be able to see like where the hottest markets pretty easily. I can see which areas of the country have the most cards on file versus not average size, properties, speed. Like I would be have every metric across the entire country nailed down like very, very tight. And I plan to use that information to help the industry help Augusta. And if people don't buy into that thought process, then yeah, they'll just, they won't believe it. So that's fine.

Force. Is it possible that if a customer doesn't want to put a card on file for otp, that command center can set up a drive by instead and tell the customer that we need to send estimator by?

No. So you're saying if they don't do a card on file, but we already have a price, you want us to set up a drive by?

No, we wouldn't do that. I wouldn't recommend doing that. It just like, I don't know, I'm guessing you would go visit the property and like talk to the customer and try to get the card information.

I see what you're saying. I think it's just, it's just better that we have a standard across the board. If you're doing over the phone estimate, you got to put a card on file. That 100% be my recommendation. Anything over the phone you want to have the card file, even if you don't require them to have it on all the time, even if you allow them to take it off, that's fine. But you've got to have a card on file. And honestly there is very little to no pushback on this. I would say one in a hundred at the max would push back having a card on file when we're doing it over the phone like that. Because they know like, okay, we're doing over the phone, we're going to take a credit card. Like, it's just like if this company is doing satellite imaging, they're going to need a card on file. And like it's, it's very linear. Whereas if you're showing up or whatever after work, it's late, you're dirty and you're like, I want your car information that might be a little more.

Drawing, you know, pushback on that. But like we don't get any. Like I would say 1 to 2% max of people are like, well, I don't want to put a car on file. Like those probably aren't going to be your best customers. I just roll with what the current system is, which is like no car in a pile, no over the phone estimate.

Second year in Evansville. How much growth should I expect? I've heard you mention second years, where returns come in. The reason the returns come in is because you won't have to pay for every single lead that comes in your first year. Year and a half is usually you paying for every single lead. All direct marketing, every lead that comes in you have to pay for your second year is typically when we see your customer acquisition costs drop. Not because you're spending less on marketing, but simply because now the vast majority of your leads are coming from word of mouth. People send your trucks, typically in your second year you're getting your second, third, fourth truck. People start to see you more, you have other franchisees around, you start more, more and more brand recognition, et cetera. So. And now you have a database of hundreds of customers to tap into for your.

One click estimate emails. Right. So typically like it's very much of a.

Generalization, I would say year one and year two are growth. Second year your customer acquisition cost improves and that's when you see your hockey stick, like really big growth. I typically select 200,000. People can jump up to 500,000 very quickly and then it's after that year three, if you go into profit mode, you can become profitable or if you keep growing, you're still going to have some of that financial pressure, but you're going to even grow up to 700,000, 800,000, etc. And then that's why I usually use three to five. So people become profitable, it's either three because they stopped growing around 500,000, kind of like I did in Mooresville and. Or if you're going to keep growing beyond that, it's fine, just not going to have as much profit. But you'll have way better customer acquisition cost beyond year one simply because year one you're literally paying for every single lead.

Using it. Somewhat overkill to run Google Local Services and Google Ads. If they pass you on the top page, then pass the maps, why would they still hit the link? Not sure if my verbiage makes sense. I don't think so. I think these are different use cases because the Google Local services they click on, it's a recorded phone call. Whereas with your Google Ad it's a click and they fill out a form or go to your website or watch a video and it's not call. Google Local Services is like call only. And in my opinion that's what's held Google Local Services back is most people are looking for lawn care like in Their break room at work, it is on the toilet. It is late at night. They're not ready to call. Right. And so I feel like eventually Google local services will have more of a forms base to it. They already have, like where you can type, but I think it'll become more of a form and then it will also tie into your website better and then it'll crush. So that's just my opinion. We'll see.

Since I started in May last year, would this be my first or second year? I would consider this your first spring rush. If, if you're in Florida, like your rush is like April, May, June. If you got started last year in May, your site probably wasn't even ranking until July or August. So I would consider this your first spring rush with your site ranking well. But I think it'll still be better than last May or June. Cause like last May or June, your site wasn't ranking. No one knew who you were. It'll be better than last year, but it's going to be next spring rush. Your second full spring rush of your site being up is when we just see typically customer acquisition cost drop. Not because people are better at marketing, not because they're spending more or less. It's simply a matter of you have brand recognition, you have one click estimate emails that are going to start driving a lot of your lead flow. And eventually you get over the course of, you know, say three to five years is when you stop marketing and you're just depending 100% on one custom emails as literally all of your leads just come from that. And that's because that's why it's so important to start that early in the process. Because in years four or five, especially like you stop marketing. I'm not using marketing for like the Bellingham shop, Mooresville, Mount Vernon. We're not doing any of the agency at all because like those are in profit mode. They depend on one click estimate emails and that is the marketing machine.

All right, everyone, have a fantastic Wednesday and we'll see you tomorrow. Take care.