Mike Minutes Mastermind 03/27/2023

Hey everyone. Welcome to another mike minutes mastermind 3M. Happy Monday. Let's go and get started. Let me just drop this in from YouTube. I wanted to start off with a few things and then we'll jump into questions. So give me a second here.

Copy if you did not see it on Friday, I did post on the Facebook group the ability to have Evergrow marketing either a manage your ads for you or B.

See their mat they are done for you ads for free and be able to copy their initial formatting and everything. So definitely check out that post. It's a full 45 minute long video. Unfortunately, he's done for you. Done for you ads videos are getting longer and longer. I think it originally started for like 10, 15 minutes. My last one was like 35 minutes. There's like 45 minutes. Just Google keeps adding layers to their ads, which is good. It means they're progressing, actually moving things forward. But it is getting a little bit more difficult. Let me just paste this into the Facebook group.

All right. I had a few things I wanted to go over.

First and foremost, this is the worst time of year for sprint, for cash flow and for cash reserves. I should say the reason for that is because you just got through the slow period of the year when you typically are either break even if you're more established, but you're definitely losing money if you're not established. So on all my new locations, we went negative during winter. Right? You don't have enough customers on winter services to cover your fixed expenses. Very, very normal in this industry. The goal is that as you grow, especially come, you're like four, five and beyond. You have enough recurring revenue throughout the winter so that you don't have to go negative. You don't have a hole that you're digging into during the wintertime. And that just comes with time because. Cause every single year you get more and more and more of them converting into winter services. The goal is eventually that you're not going negative during the winter. You're at least breaking even. Okay. It's also like, especially if you're trying to grow, it's even harder right now because you're trying to buy trucks, hire more people, do marketing, all this other stuff, while at the same time your cash position is at its lowest point of the year. Okay. So keep that in mind as well.

It's very normal. Everyone's going through it. I put in capital into all my locations a couple weeks ago. Just kind of like make sure they have enough working capital through the spring rush and so it's very normal. And if I was on my first location and just trying to grow and be scrappy, like, it's tough. This is the toughest time of year because the financial pressure it creates compounds and amplifies every problem you're gonna have with employees. Customer reviews, bad job, bad jobs, going bad. It compounds everything because the financial press pressure is there. And so I'm only saying this to be so, you know, you're not strange or weird, like, different. This is very common, especially if you're trying to grow and you're having compounding issues of spring rush with employees, and then you're getting employees, like, more employees than you've ever had before, and then they walk off the job or they quit or whatever. And so, like, that's going to happen. The emotional and financial turbulence comes right during the spring rush. Okay? So just keep that in mind. It's extremely normal. And it only gets better. Usually in. I've seen after year four and five, once you have enough winter services to keep your cash reserves just as high throughout the winter. Next thing I had on my list, I was talking with the Franchise Advisory Council, and they had a. We were talking this morning about some things, and I wanted to show some stuff.

I know that I've said. I said originally that, like, it would take us. I'd say in five. I said in five years that there would be a very clear and unique.

Differentiating factor of joining Augusta and, like, a unfair advantage that would put us at the end of 2024 is when. That would be five years when we started. And for the first, like, 10 franchisees that joined, even the first 20 or 30, they definitely. Their advantage was they got way less franchise fee.

And I think that that is completely fair because they've taken massive risks. We had. We didn't have all of our systems nailed down at command. We didn't have as many trainers and coaches, and the training was not as good, like, not even close. We were still learning our. On our end. There's a massive amount of risk joining a new franchise that the first 10 franchisees, none of them paid over $10,000 for their franchise fee.

And some of them got in for way less, like the first few. But the bottom line is.

They were joining a franchise, like, with basically no track record whatsoever. So I believe that they deserve that. To the advantage of the beginning was somewhat cost savings. And the goal is that over time, like, I would say within those five years, like in a couple more years, the franchise, you'll probably be 30 plus. Thousand and so the goal is that your franchise license, you're able to sell that if you were ever to sell. And I'm not a huge fan of proponent of selling a business, but the value on your balance sheet is there, right? So if someone joined for say 10,000 a couple years ago.

And in a couple years worth 30,000, I think it's pretty good in terms of just the valuation side of things. It's not really why you should join a franchise though.

Right now I would say the, the reason someone should join Augusta is for simply executional excellence for themselves and execution against the systems. And the reason we were talking about this in the Franchise Franchise Advisory Council is because there can be concerns of, you know, me sharing stuff on online publicly.

Free content. And I want to be really clear that no one listens. This is why I joined, this is why I started Augusta. No one listens. And I wanted to actually show it because I say that all the time and no one really believes me. We just. Fine, I'm going to prove it to you. I'm going to show you what we make on P4P inside that stripe account and how many people actually use P4P. After years of me trying to push it and have the software, how few people actually use it. There are more people inside of Augusta Nation using the software than are currently active using the software from the public universe. So what that tells me is that over half, over half, like 65 to 70% of users that are active inside of P4P software are Augusta Lawn Care franchisees. Also 50% of the users that are not inside of Augusta, So now we're talking about this, call it 30, 30% of the users, half of those, so now we're down to 15% actually send out their daily reports correctly from P4P which is sending the reports to the employees, their leaderboards done correctly, they're not charging variable different base pays and they actually send the reports. They're their employees. The reason we track that they send them send the reports is because if you, if you don't send the reports, typically it means there's other things that are, they've not done correctly. For example, they don't have trainers pay, they don't have open book management. They're not showing their guys the leaderboard. They don't have their employees clocking into the app because they don't want them to see other people's information.

So there's about 15% now that is less than 12 people.

In the universe outside of Augusta Nation. So.

I Just want to show the numbers though, so everyone's very, very clear. And the fact is that even just P4P, that in and of itself is still. The vast majority is Augusta Lawn Care. It's for Augusta Lawn Care. The reason we made it public is we need the financials. I'm going to show you, like what we make from, from charging for P4P still does not cover even one developer to be working on the account. And so. Well, why do we keep doing it? Keep doing it? Because I believe that what we're working on end of this year when we integrate with copilot again, I was like, well, what about copilot? Look, if you're not doing P4P and you have Copilot, yeah, it'll be a good software. It'll help you. Assuming that you actually listen to it, it tells you to do. But when you have P4P with Copilot and you actually implement P4P correctly and your guys now have a live dashboard of all their jobs and how much they're making, and then you have a, like a.

A healthy competition of actually seeing live. All the employees there will see who's making the most money that day, most efficient that day as they complete jobs throughout the day.

I just don't believe that that is a, that is going to be. That employee is going to be less engaged or be retained less than someone who's working hourly using the exact same Copilot software, but someone who doesn't actually use P4P and implement open book management and like all the stuff that we want to do inside there. So anyways, let me actually show you. Share screen. Let's see here P4P where it is. Okay, so this is P4P software. This is the stripe account. Okay, so you can see here, we have made $100,000 in the past year. Let's go.

It's usually right around what, 8,9000amonth. This month is our best month so far. 11,000. We've implement improved the training a little bit. Obviously the software has become a little bit just better. We're slowly improving it. So yeah, 11,000 is our best month so far, but it's usually around 8,9000. Okay, cool. Let's see, users. Where are we at? Where are we at? Where we at?

Where did I go? I had it here too. It's like 90 something. Where'd it go? Where'd it go? There it is. 94. There are 94 active subscribers inside of P4P. Let's go. Okay, sweet.

That metric right there is approximately 28% of what we spent in development last year. This year we won't spend that much because we were spending about 30,000amonth and we reduced that down to approximately 16 to 17,000amonth in development. Just the development that doesn't include support, that doesn't include any software backend databasing, any of the subscriptions we have to pay for to host the site, none of that. So I just want to be very clear that P4P is still the vast majority Augusta lawn care. And it will probably always be that way simply because the execution of P4P is way better. When you have the training, you have the automations and you have the support, you have the back end command center being able to put in things correctly for you. You're doing estimate videos, you're doing open book management, you're doing all these other things. And in my opinion the advantage right now for Augusta, it's like when you go like everyone's like bagging on Built for business, right? Built for business is basically the health program thing. I started with with Christian at the gym. They're like, it's so expensive, it's so simple to eat right and you know, eat right and drink water and work out hard. Great. Yes, I agree.

Here's why you have a trainer, the reason you pay for a trainer and why the best of the best of the best athletes have trainers is because they know that one part of their exercise regimen, or their nutrition or their accountability or their stretching and their flexibility, one part of that being misplaced, breaks the entire system. One thing done wrong breaks all the other good things they've done. If you can eat the best, you can work out, have an incredible regimen for working out, great cardio, super healthy. But if you don't sleep, it ruins everything. Your, your tissues don't repair correctly, your muscle will not grow, you'll be deprived of energy and you'll likely lead to injury. Especially if you're in like you're doing heavy workloads or you're doing athletics. The same is true in business. And this is why I started Augusta.

Someone's like, oh great, I'm going to use long term meaning use door hangers. I'm going to use instant quote door hangers and just like dominate, say great, you're going to get some more leads. But when those leads come in and you need more, more employees, if you're not using P4P, I'm sorry, that's not going to sustainable, it's not going to Lead to the fact that you can step away from the business and operate without you and run on systems and not need you there. Everyone's like, oh man, like long hair web design. Okay, Great, yeah, it's 400amonth.

They do really well. And the bottom line is if you get a whole bunch of leads and you don't answer your phone and the vast majority of them, I call our lawn care witness and clients, 80 to 90% of them will not pick up their phone. And the people that leave messages, about 50% of them will not, I'll never hear back from. So having command center is another crucial part of the health. It's just another component, piece and part. And so.

It'S easy to think about each of these things as separate items. P4P, open book management, profit sharing, command center.

Having systems in place around project management, videos and estimates and like, oh, each of these things, I guarantee you, guarantee you without a shadow of doubt, there's not a single person outside of a Gusta Nation that's implemented all those systems across the board. Not a single one that has actually uses longer web design, has P4P uses Copilot.

Actually fundamentally uses profit sharing and open book management. No. No one. And so that's why we started Augusta and in June, half of the reason why I'm going to go out to North Carolina, do this for 30 days, because I do not have the time to do that. Half of the reason is so that I can, I can literally give 30 videos to all of you, say, hey, this is exactly what to do. And there will not be any deviation from the systems. There will not be one inkling, one shadow of error away from what we talk about every single day. P4P will institute from day one. There will not be any other option. There won't be multiple varying rates. There won't be things done on the table. There'll be open book management from day one with the employees. I'll be hiring GM from day one, having to train them up. They'll come to command, they'll come here to get trained up as a gm. I will never go back to that location again outside of to make a video.

That's what systems do. And any component part of that entire process withstanding would not allow that process to work. You say, oh, well, I don't need to have, I don't need to have my GM trained. Like, how am I going to leave after 30 days if I can't bring them here in July and have them trained up? And so that's why you join a franchise and right now, that's the advantage, is having all the component parts and the system to follow. That's still up to you. And making this video, I hope that it just convinces people that it's like, okay, I don't believe in PvP. I don't think it works in my market. I don't think whatever XYZ thing works. I don't think that I should use commands there. I'm just going to do it exactly as we talk about. I'm going to show every single part and then my budget and what I'm spending money on, what I'm spending my time on. My hope is that it helps alleviate some of those.

Question marks of whether or not you should do it. Because if you listen like Liz's video, she's making with a lot of the franchisees that start right at the very beginning, a lot of them, their thing that they wish they would exchange or regret is I wish I just followed the systems from day one. So why does it take us one, two, three years of pain to figure out that the systems work and that like, that they should be implementing, they're better for the business? Why does it take that long? Because it simply comes down to trust. And I'm okay with that. I'm just like, that's the facts. You don't trust the trust the process. And as we grow and scale Augusta, the hope is that there's more trust because volume and numbers, there's power numbers. And secondly, I need to go make a video that will literally walk you through every single step of that process. Setting up my ads, like, all of it's the exact same. I'm going to do an onboarding call with command center to get all my full service set up. Everything. And so I would say right now, the advantage of joining Augusta, in addition to like the soft things of like community and having some camaraderie and help, is that all the systems are in place. You have command center to answer your phones. Like, phone calls don't get missed. You have them via your payroll and your emails. You have a coach to bounce things off of when you're really low and you're not thinking clearly, someone to bounce things off of. You have paper performance. You have your website firing things off. Like, we. I don't even talk about the website. We spend a lot of time on the website. I spent three hours on Saturday, the phone call, trying to go over things for our new web design development thing in summer. It's like, that's all the advantages right now, the advantages in a couple years when we hit that five year marker in my opinion will be when technology starts to kick in. That's when everyone's like okay, this is unfair, right? Because when you have, when you start taking the infrastructure that we will build, continue to build the next couple of years until we hit that five year mark, where I have said publicly that it'll be more clear. The infrastructure compounded with the technology is what will make it powerful. Robotics coming along in this is now 10 to 15 years away will come, will make sense only for the operation that has the infrastructure, the back end to support things. Thousands of robots operating throughout the day. Let's bring it closer today though. The most, the, the, the most powerful thing that will happen is when we take the infrastructure like command center and then we AI, we empower that with AI. We have a 247 operation where now you have P4P being on everyone's phones, the employees out in the field and that is interplaying with Copilot which is interplaying with Ringcentral and all of that's being controlled on our back end.

The reason it will be so hard to duplicate even in a couple of years is because.

No one is doing all of them together.

Just doing one thing is not going to help you. It's like literally take it trying to take a pill. It's like oh man, if I just take all these vitamins, this is why the supplement industry crushes it. Because man, if I just take this whey protein powder and I take a little bit of this, you know, collagen and I take some of this, these amino acids, I'm gonna like just look amazing. They are healthy, they are good for you. Yes, P4P is good for you. Yes, your website is good for you. Yes, long care meeting can help you, yes home service, EPA can help you. But any one of those pieces gone, the whole thing falls apart. And just having that one pill is not gonna help you. It's everything. It's a full deal. Like it's the whole business. And so I just want to go over that. Cool. That was a 20 minute rant. Merciful heavens.

Okay, let's see here. Let me jump back to.

Questions real quick. Before to jump into questions if I know there's a couple people have asked me if you would like to submit to the media team your videos and have them make a video kind of like they did for Chuck. Let us know just media august service.com if you need help with anything. Basically if you Just put them all in a Google Drive over the course of a couple weeks. That'd be great. So it's going to be helpful for other owners inside of Augustination as well as the industry in general to see that their ups and downs, their ins and outs, there's plenty of drama that happens, whether it be internally, terms of family, employees, et cetera, customer drama, financial pressure. And you are more than welcome. If you want to put that into a folder, we will make a video out of it. And as you've seen recently, Stephen's pretty phenomenal at making some pretty high level content. So it's be a cool thing to have, honestly, especially if you're at the beginning stages to look back on in a few years. So if you'd like that, definitely feel free to share that Google Drive folder with all the videos in there. If you have two to four weeks of worth of videos, it's likely that Steven will be able to make something pretty cool out of it. So look at my post a couple weeks back giving more details about that. Okay, let's jump into questions. Let's see here. I don't know who this is, but I've used every system I can since day one. The only thing I don't have commands I'm doing is P4P and payroll. I've been doing it myself. Last year I had tons of questions about what the daily reports meant and since I was new I didn't have all the answers. I still don't use P4P software, but I use everything else. Should I use it in the background for a couple weeks before telling them to use it so I can start to understand it or just rip off the band aid? I definitely would recommend doing it a little bit by yourself in the back end. So it sounds like you're running P4P but you're not running the actual software. I would highly recommend the software. Like there's a reason why I'm spending so much money on it is because like I really think it'll help you. Let me see if I can open up my app real quick.

Come on, load. I think I'm in an admin account. One second.

Come on. There you go. So if you're using service all part, for example, your employees cannot see their timesheets historically kind of stinks. So P4P is helpful for that just in and of itself. But more importantly now on the app they can see all of their historical data and whether or not they are trending in a positive direction. Also, as of this week they're going to get push notifications when you send out daily reports. They're not just going to get emails. They're going to push notifications to the app to see their report. They're going to see reports throughout the time. There's a whole bunch of things that will be coming. I would highly recommend going on the app, not because of what it is today, although it's now very good. They can see what they're making over the course of months, what they're trending. They can see the leaderboard, the top three employees. Like if you only have, say, five employees working and the first guy, someone joins you and they're like this P50P things a joke. I haven't got it the past two pay periods, it's all fugazi. But they can see in the app that there's people making 25, $26 an hour and it's like, oh, like there's no longer the excuse of like, oh, this is made up. It's like, no, those people are really making money. You go talk to them and ask them if you want. So it helps people get motivated and realize that P4P is real and that there is something to push towards. It gets them up to speed on people much more. We're starting to launch the 3D notifications which notifies them and helps them, like, encourage them throughout those first few weeks. Like the first day they get above P4P or above base pay, the first pay period, and kind of coaches them through when there's bad days and how it affects their pay. It coaches them through all of that. It tells them when they're not doing good, when they're trending down, when they. Who they should be talking to. So there's a lot. I highly recommend it. However, where this is going to go when we have Copilot is a whole different level.

I need, I need Copilot just as much for PvP because no one else would let us integrate to the extent that we need it to. For me to have a live dashboard on the phone, right? The only way that I can actually have live time data for the employees to be able to see how much they're making, see all their team members, what they're making that day, and have it more of like a competition throughout the day. They can see live, like live yellow slips that come in as they, you know, the offices, hey, there's a yellow slip. Boom. They can see live. So and so just got a yellow slip. Like, all of that is what we want to build that's why I'm still spending so much. That's why I believe in the software so much. And, and push and pay for it so much, regardless of it not paying for itself publicly. It's for Augusta. It is 100% for Augusta. Because people are not doing outside of Augusta. It's not. And they honestly can't because they're trying to do one piece of a pie that they can't duplicate elsewhere. They're not sending their reports out. You know why? Because they, they wait till the end of the week to do all the reporting and then it's trash. Like, you can't run accurate PVP reports if you wait till the end of the week. You got to do it every single day. Well, they can't do it every single day because they're so busy. They're. That's why you have command center. They can run it for you literally in like five to ten minutes a day. They can run all of your P4P for you. Right? They can send the reports out to your employees. The employees get like 9, 10, 11 o' clock or whatever. They get a message saying that, you know what the report was from yesterday and they can actually remember it versus a week later when they have no idea what they were doing in terms of that day.

All right, off the soapbox onto this one. Here we go. Questions? Here we go.

North Carolina, have you ever done financing for a project? What the customer once done is routine. Five to eight thousand pros versus cons. There's really not a lot of cons for you. I would recommend going through wisetac in terms of like, let someone else do the buy now, pay later in the financing. You do not want to become the bank. We do not have legal protections as a bank. So definitely let something like wisetac be the one that to do that. If you're in service, obviously that integration is not there. I would not touch it. I wouldn't worry about it. I just tell them, hey, like, put in a credit card, pay it off over the course of a few months. Right? If you're in super, you can do the wisetack integration. And we are working on the same thing with Copilot to have that option. Ken, Michigan, I'm on Zooper and would like to use the free version of Copilot as much as possible. Wait, is these. These are old.

Sorry, I think I answered this question. I answered this question on Friday. I don't know if it was this one or not.

Yeah, I would only do Copilot stuff. If you don't have any stuff to do, not Command Center. All my locations are still on service autopilot and they will be until we switch everything over at command. Joel from Lafayette. Is there a document in the dashboard that describes in some more detail what each of the CC full service tasks entails and what the expectation is for each task? There is actually on the Academy a video of each of the tasks, so on.

Franchise.

Okay.

So from here, if you want to modify your Command center task, this is where that list is at. So these are all the different full service tasks that can be done. If you want to see them in action actually being done, just go to Academy.

Right here you can see Command center in action. So some of these we can't show because YouTube will pull them off of the.

Their service as soon as they see customer data. So these are actually pretty tough to make and not get filtered out. So some of them, we can't put like 95% of the services at Command Center. This is basically. And this is not. These are not training videos. Let me be clear. These are just us doing our job. And the media team threw up a camera on them, said, hey, do you do your job as you map a territory or send a newsletter out, for example? And these are just short videos so you can watch exactly what they're doing. And these mostly correspond with this list that is on for your list of services.

Boom.

Okay, next one.

Present.

Okay. Logan from Grand Island, Nebraska, in reference to the initial mowing line item, will CC stop putting initial mowing the estimates when sending them out? I had three mowing estimates go out today, all with mowing and initial mowing on them. See here?

Yeah. So this is, this is going to stop as of today because when I made the notice last week, as of this, today, like this will stop happening. You might get one or two fall through the cracks. But the. But the way we're training them is to not have both these on there. The reason it might fall through the cracks, if you haven't updated your verbiage to have initial mow on the verbiage. If they see initial mo in the verbiage of mowing, there won't even be the inclination to do the initial mower. Right. So we are going, we are trying to train them to remember to add it in if you have not done so yourself. But I would just recommend using the verbiage we talked about last week. Change your mowing verbiage to include the initial mow price of $1 per minute. Whatever per man inside There then there will be no inclination for commands that are even add the initial mow thing in there. So. But yeah, give us a while. Like we have trained and be into them this for so long. There will absolutely be some mistakes for the next couple weeks and we will add these in there. But the way you can really help us is change your verbiage in mowing verbiage to have initial mow. But eventually we'll get everyone to where it's always just one line item and there's not confusion.

Terre Boone's Creek.

We require any customer signing up to a standard estimate process to be on weekly service march through May. What about door hangers? When I'm putting a lot out, I don't take the time to write weekly loan services required. So we'll get people wanting the bi weekly price now in the spring. Not a huge deal. It's just that I'm not sure if I should make a deal of it or just get them signed up or if I don't want them to be accepting bi weekly this spring. Maybe only weekly prices on. Yeah. So if you're doing door hangers and you're putting the weekly, bi weekly price out there.

Two things. Number one, I wouldn't have this as a hill to die on. I'd rather get the customer than say, oh no, you're not doing it weekly if it's a door hanger, etc. What I would do though is when they.

When they call in and they, they are they sorry, they're gonna send you an email with that picture, right? I would then call them up, say, hey, I'm gonna go ahead and send you over the prices. I just go ahead and click accept on the ones you want, etc. Or send it to them and then call them and say I just wanted to make sure you have it in writing. And so it's not just, you know, a marker on a door hanger. Can I laugh about it? They chuckle they have it in their, in their inbox. They go and click accept or even just do it on the phone. Great. Do you see it? Great. So we do require weekly during these months and then go for it. The thing about with the door hangers is you still have to contact them to get service set up. Like, yes, they've accepted but you can still contact them. Right. So you could literally even just leave them a voice message. Be like, hey, thanks so much. We got your email with your contact information for the price of the mowing. We're going to go get you set up for mowing. And again they're only sending you a picture of the whole door hanger. Now if they call in, that's a different topic. Right. But if they take a picture of that door hanger they haven't accepted biweekly. So what your goal is is just to roll right with it. Yep. So we do everyone it's required March through May, we do weekly and then after that if you ever want to cancel service or switch to bi weekly, that's totally fine. Like just roll right with into it. This should not be a big problem because they can't accept the bi weekly price without you having some contact with them either them emailing you or calling you. Right. And if they call you that you're still going to need them to email the picture because you're not keeping track of your database of the pricing.

Nick from Marysville before typing this I searched the mastermind that you touched on the topic of auto insurance recently. So thank you to the guys who have been adding the keywords to the masterminds. One part that wasn't asked what would the limit of your liability insurance be? Right now mine is $25,000. Is that extremely low? Yes, it is extremely low. Is one of our guy, if one of our guys gets hit, hits someone and the person is seriously injured, am I on the hook for their medical bills and everything beyond 25k? Anything beyond 25k you're in the hook for. Yes. Also you mentioned by the way, liability insurance for auto is the cheapest form of insurance. It's also what's required. But going from like 25,000 to 100,000 is not a lot. 100,000, 200,000 not a lot when you add like comp, collision etc. Now it depends on the truck. I need to put a big asterisk depending on your truck. Depending on your state too. There's, there's limits here but I would not skimp on liability down to 25k. I would definitely make sure you have at least 100. Right. Like we're talking like 25k can go like this. If so if you someone gets hit and they have to get medevacked right. Like immediately there's 25k. So also you mentioned that you don't need to add every single driver policy. As long as I have a policy we are covered. Is that true to this day? Do you know? Because sometimes my insurance will decline covering an employee based on their record but based off what you said I could just not add them and they will be still covered. Or does this depends solely on the provider. Yeah. So a commercial auto insurance policy covers the vehicles, not the drivers. Now they want you to give you the, give you their driver information at least once a year. They're going to ask for that employee information. But technically the reason I look I worked at State Farm, I remember dealing with this and it was.

Owners would call in, be like hey, do I need to add in my employee time? We'd say yes. And then we also know that we only need to put that information once a year. And if they're moving employees in and out throughout the year, those trucks are covered. No matter what that might lead to that employee the, the insurance dropping you in the event of a massive collision that costs them hundreds of thousands of dol dollars. But on the, on the down low like they are covered but they're going to want to give. They're going to tell you that they need their employ their driver's information all the time. But again that's for commercial auto those, that's how the policies work. So.

They'Ll always say like no, we need employees like within seven days of them joining and we can tell them like but technically the vehicles are covered so. But you did not hear that from me. That's not financial advice. Kyle Tarvin our more location had about 6 to 7k. I have hands tools stolen this week. Would this be something you would put on our insurance? Our deductible is 2k value. I wouldn't.

I wouldn't. I know it's horrible. Unless that 6 to 7k is literally gonna like crush you. I wouldn't.

Man. That stinks. I'm sorry man. It's happened to us before too.

Yeah. If the 6 to 7k is going to clean you out, that's when I would make the deduct, you know, pay the deductible two grand and go for it. But again, four to five K. You're saving on this. Basically.

You'Re going to pay for that over the course of the next five to ten years on your insurance. Right. So if you can swallow it, I would try.

Ken Venton, Michigan can you go over the process switching from solo to growth model again? Is the first time you that you hit 20k in one month or is it a slow ramp up to that one month? What if you hit 20k for a project and then you're constantly consistently only at 6k for the rest of the year. I'm also curious about switching to service all part if you hit that 20k in one month or would you stay with super or switch to Copilot. I'd recommend just staying with whatever software you're currently at until the end of this year. That's. That would be my recommendation. Do not switch now and switch again in at the end of the year. There's been a bunch of people already switch but we're in the spring rush. Like you do not want to be switching now, right? I'd stick with what you got regardless of what your size is till the end of the year and switch one time. In terms of the transition to growth model, as soon as you get above $20,000 in one month, that one year clock starts ticking. Of when you need to join as a growth model, I would highly doubt that you would ever do six, twenty thousand dollars a month and then the rest of the year be at 6,000 simply because the labor capacity, even if you have big projects like the labor capacity, you're not going to do a $20,000 product by yourself because $6,000 is like part time, right? So you going from part time to $20,000 a month in revenue even with a big project is unlikely.

But as soon as that 20,000, that's when the one year clock starts ticking and then it's two years from when you signed up. Otherwise, unless it was you signed up before January, this January was the start of that clock for you. Talk to your coaches on your monthly, on your coaching calls. They'll definitely give you an exact timeline if and when that happens. And again like back to this one, we're not going to like pull from out from underneath you and say you have to leave Augusta because you're a couple months behind on this. Like we're going to work with you. Our goal here is to get you to becoming a growth locking in a territory and be able to scale up. Right. So just remember like we're not like this is. I didn't think we needed to do this. I, I think it's, it's a something Franchise Advisory council thought was important to really get people to buy in, have a selective territory and not create confusion between territories as we get closer. And I support that. But we're going to work with you. Like if you're working towards it, we're going to make sure that we make it happen for you and we'll work with you on this. Connor from Evansville. We use 52 inch zero turns as a standard here. We probably only push MOW 25 to 30% of our backyards and have only a handful of pushmo clients. Zero turns being the standard, is it worth putting an estimate calculated 50% increase for push only to make up the time difference?

I would probably say in this case that you are probably doing all your smallest mos like square footage wise.

What you could do like so I don't know what you're, I'm not looking at your estimate calculator Connor. But what I'd probably be guessing is that the smaller size properties are the ones you're doing push mowers on. So I would increase those and even potentially if you have say like a 5 or 6,000 square foot as a minimum, maybe take that down to 3,000 but then actually inflate the prices from 3 to 6,000. Right? Because typically you're gonna know that's where your, your push mowers are. If that's that's a concern to you, that's probably what I would try doing because otherwise like you just don't know what type of equipment you're going to need on the property until you're kind of there.

So that'd be my recommendation. Now to make sure you nail it and you hit all of them is like okay if your minimum is at 5 or 6,000 square feet right now because you're mostly doing bigger properties, just go lower on your estimate calculator and inflate the prices from like say 2000 to 5000 by like 510 bucks or whatever it is.

Last one. Logan, Grand Island, Nebraska what are your final recommendations for Google Ads? I thought the video ever grow made was good and pointed out a few things that we weren't doing with the done for your ads. However some things didn't line up so much with what you usually do. You mentioned you'll make a follow up video to theirs. Will you make that soon for us or should we just have what they have? Also should we just do what they have? Also should we do search only or you still like performance max?

The performance max one I think is more of like a growth strategy. You have the capital to be able to grow and there's people in a guided guest like I have capital, I want to spend it, I want to grow at all costs. You're going to do more Things like doing YouTube ads or display banners. Those are going to be more a wider net that you're casting. If you have a very selective ad budget, search only is going to be where you're going to your best bang for your buck. Right? Your cost per click is going to be the best there. Sorry, not your cost per click but your customer acquisition cost will Be the best there because people have intent to buy you. The reason I say your cost per click might not miss be least is because people will see way more say YouTube or banner ads, but they're not actively looking. They have intent to buy. And so the problem with performance max is that you are reaching people that don't not have intent to buy. They're not searching necessarily for your services. So what I would recommend doing is if you have plenty of capital and you're trying to deploy it, I would put money into performance max and search. If you have a much more limited budget and every dollar is counting and you're kind of in either profit mode, but you probably need marketing if you're in profit mode. If you're like, if you're really tight on the budget from a marketing perspective, I'd probably be doing search only. And so I will make a video about this kind of clearing up this. I want to kind of get under my belt actually using Evergrow for a few weeks. So they're starting today at all my locations managing it. I'll have that data of my performance max data. I'll be able to compare the two. I've already kind of given the recommendation if you're spending more than 1500-2000amonth, you should just use them to manage your account. Because the incremental benefit that they bring of managing and constantly tweaking things throughout the day based on every single keyword and all the rest of it, like there's 40 different campaigns they're running and all, then it's worth it. You're only doing three, four hundred dollars a month. There's no reason to go get them to manage your ads. And I would just recommend doing search only. Every single click counts, every single dollar counts. And if you're doing a much wider audience, you need performance max, right? Like so, for example, when I go to North Carolina, I'm going to do performance max, reaching as many people as possible. More of a broad base. I'm also hitting search in that I do know that there's forms, et cetera. But then besides search only, I'd be going more in the direction of intent based marketing. Two different ways of marketing, by the way. And that's why some of their verbiage, the thing that they say is different than what I say. Because I'm thinking performance max. I'm thinking like broad appeal, wide net. Everyone's looking at this. When you go search, it's different. You're going after keywords, you're going to people are looking for a specific service and so the way that you target that is very different. So that's how I kind of approach both of those. If you have a limited budget, I'd be like, I guess there's kind of three different ones, right? You got, you're trying to spend a lot of money. I'd be doing both. I'd be doing performance max and I'd be doing Google search. If you have a tighter budget, probably just Google search. If you're in profit mode and you're not doing any marketing like several of my locations, you don't do anything. Like we don't, we aren't spending any money on marketing at like Bellingham, Mount Vernon, Mooresville, etc, those are like unloaded. They're in profit mode and they should be pumping out profit. Right. So hope it made sense.

To follow up then. Do you think sticking to their exact verbiage targeting location would work for us or should we use the verbiage on your done for you ads? I would stick to what they have.

Keep in mind that part of their management is that they would then take every single one of those verbiage and change it like 40 times. Right. So like what I say. And they say if you, if they were managing their your account, they'd probably have a different ad set, they'd have different titles. They test every single thing. So they might be somewhat different, but it's going to be something they would, they would be doing. When with search it's less about those the verbiage as much because with search you're just paying to get in front of someone that's looking for that service. The question is how do you get them to say like that's for me. Right, because it's like the name of the city. Things like that is the goal. Marathon Mondays are back. 45 minutes. Let's go, baby. All right, you guys have a great rest of your week. Logan, if I didn't answer your question directly enough, I apologize. I'll have a lot better of an answer I think at the end of April once we actually have evergrow have managed the account for us for a while. And I have a very good point of view on their verbiage vs mine metric, google performance max vs their done for you ads vs them managing etc. So give me a little bit of time on that. But for now I would probably say if you have a limited budget, use only theirs. Use their verbiage exactly. Just so you can follow exactly. And then that way if you have questions in their video, just comment like, hey, I hit this roadblock, and they'll be able to help you. Right? That's what I would do. All right, guys, have a fantastic rest of your week. We'll see you tomorrow.