Mike Minutes Mastermind 03/29/2023

Hey everyone, hope you're doing super well. Let's go and get started and just drop this in the Facebook group. I have a couple quick feature updates on PPP I wanted to go over.

All right.

On P4P. Let's jump into that real quick. We've added several new things.

Okay. So first and foremost.

We will add these some training more. Some more training videos to p4psoftware.com training so they'll be more in depth. I just want to kind of alert everyone here. 3D notifications. This is for your employees to be able to set if they're on, off and if they're manual or automatic. We don't have all of these notifications done yet. We have about five or ten left to do. I'd recommend having these on and then if you are in here every day checking and approving notifications, then go ahead and leave this to manual if you would like to manually review them. Otherwise I just leave them on automatic. We've tried to make the notifications or even if they somehow went out wrong because you did a time card incorrectly or something like that, it's not really bad and it's not going to make anyone mad.

So.

If you leave it to manual though, what's going to happen? And you can see here what they were, what the notification is going to be to the employee. And then over here in the 3D notification portal, if you do mark them as.

For review, like where you have to manually review them, then they'll show up here and you'll be able to see them and accept or decline them and then it'll go into the appropriate category. So personally, I'd recommend just putting everything in your 3D notification settings to being on and automatic. That just be my recommendation. And then yes, there'll be times we accidentally do a time card incorrectly or someone just does a horrible job, but it's your fault. And then they get a notification that says like they're doing slower than usual. But we just made sure that the verbiage of these notifications is is enough to say like that there could be something wrong. Right. So feel free to look through the notifications and see what it says and what they are. But Command center isn't going to go through these and decide this part for you. So if Command center is running the reason I'm talking about this is if Command center is running your P4P, they're not going to change your notification settings. Okay. So it's actually until up until next week. They won't even have the chance to disable them from doing this. But we're going to enable it, but we're not going to be doing this de facto. So if you want these done. And I would highly recommend using this, the app, and I highly Recommend Having the 3D notifications on. I just send automatic if you don't want to be in here every day making sure that they're correct. But I know there's also locations are running their own P4P. Totally fine. Awesome.

Let's go.

That's why I'm making this for you as well. Notifications again, if you're putting them on manual, just make sure you're checking your 3D notification portal. These are gone. And these are different than the three notifications that come in for you as the manager up top here about organization, team efficiency, specific employees that are doing good or bad. That's. These are for you. These notifications. Okay. The ones for your employees are determined by the 3D notification settings and 3D notification portal. All right.

Another thing that we are doing, and that is I can see if I can't pull this up really fast. Hopefully there's one wrong. Yes. So now what we're doing is if there is issues, if someone ever creates a time card and they don't run payroll, there's gonna be a warning now that your payrolls do not match your time cards. When you're running reports again, Command center doing this for you. This feature specifically for Command center to avoid any sort of problems and be able to very quickly, before they submit payroll, not have to check all the days or double check things. This will basically do all the double checking for them. This is caused by the fact that people will sometimes create a time card, fill information, but then never run payrolls and ever click that button that actually initiates P4P being ran. So it'll now notify you and we'll be adding an alert that says.

Adding an alert that says.

When that alert pops up there, it's going to say if a time card has been created. But Generate Pro button has not been clicked to reflect these value changes, etc. So this could be. If you go back in like last week, for example, and change someone's time card because something happened, totally fine. But you need to make sure you click Generate payrolls again to actually make sure it goes from the time cards into reports. So this will now just remind you. So when you're running a report for payroll, it notifies you and Command center specifically asked for this one. And so we did that. Also on the mobile app where the employees see their time cards.

Which still to this day boggles my mind. That service Autopilot doesn't allow you to see the time the employees to see their time cards from the app. But in P2P, as long as you're using that as the clock in and clock out, which I recommend underneath timesheets, they will now be able to see their total hours worked for the week at the top. So it won't just show the days and their hours they work each day. It'll show at the top as well for the employees on the mobile device. So those are all mostly feedback requests and feature requests from Command center, since they do this all day for dozens and dozens of locations and really get to see the little bumps that might need ironed out. All right.

See, make sure I got everything. I think there's one other thing I wanted to talk about. Oh, that was it. Okay, cool. All right, let's jump into.

Sorry. Oh, there's four. Okay.

Present.

Give me a second, guys.

Sorry.

There you go. Sorry. Now it should be better. Okay.

Landon from Tallahassee. Hey. I've been really struggling with closed ratio. It's so confusing because I really try to do everything in a T that I'm told I'm in growth mode and I've lost 7 jobs, mostly projects with some mo's. I charge 70 per hour and I haven't been charging EF much material markup or dump fee and still can't close. I call clients after trying to use scarcity and offer discounts but still get declined. I realized 7 isn't a huge sample size, but last month I had a 50 close ratio doing the same thing. I feel like dropping my hourly rate kind of significantly is that last thing I can do at this point. What else can I do? I'm not opposed to that landing, especially because you're by yourself to drop it down to 60. I don't think that's going to be like the only thing that moves the needle. But you could definitely do it because honestly, when you're solo, you in the matter of a few days, if you close say six of those seven jobs, you would basically, especially the projects and some MO's. You're gonna be booked out for like a week and a half because seven projects, if they're assuming they're all a day long, it's a week and a half. You're booked out assuming, you know, seven, eight budget hours each.

Say they're five. You're booked out a week and so what you could do is say okay, I'm gonna have that as soon as I am booked out two weeks, I'm raising my price back up to where I need it to be at 70. So just do 60. And honestly a lot of times this is a mental thing. Put down a 60 close as much as possible, try to get 70% close ratio and then if you, when you hit two weeks then put back to 70. Right.

Again some of this remember if you're just getting your first seven, like there's confidence as well that comes with doing this over and over and over again. And if last month you did 50% close ratio, it means like it's probably not your pricing but I would like that to be at 70. Right. So this could be a matter of okay, making sure that the estimate notes get attached to the visit. As soon as you're, you walk away from the customer's house like in the driveway, like speed, right. If you're following up the next day. Great, that's awesome. If you're still not getting a response, send them the estimate again. Let them go through the five day follow up sequence again. Right. I know I had mentioned that the other day. I think everyone, if you don't, if an estimate goes through the five day cycle of like calls from command, email, email automations going out and reminding them and they're still not, they haven't responded, I just send the estimate again. That'll trigger the automations again. Like if you don't get a response, send it again. Like let it go through the automations again. Follow up on it. Especially with projects.

Right.

So I definitely talk to a coach and have them actually look over your estimate notes. Look over when you're sending these estimates out, make sure your, your estimate notes are not confusing customers potentially what you're saying on those calls. Maybe record one. Right. Like take advantage of these coaching calls especially for those of you like record yourself doing one of these calls to your customers and then have a coach analyze it and say okay, right that point, don't start talking about price yet. They're not, don't jump to that as the de facto close method. Right. Use other methods of like answering questions. You know, a lot of these objections are not about price and so it's about scheduling, it's about questions on the estimate. So like they can literally just record it. Do one on voice note and then record with another device your phone call doing a follow up, do a couple of them, let your coach listen to it for three or five minutes. When you're starting a coaching call and they'll have. They'll have feedback for you. So.

Jake from Rexburg, Idaho. Oh, I saw this too. Our Google business listing was suspended over three weeks ago. So I get a notice every time someone listing gets suspended. I put that on a couple months back because I was so annoyed at Google. Our Google business listing was suspended three weeks ago just after a week after it was set up. I sent multiple reinstatement requests and finally heard back from Google this week saying that it was denied. I searched for a direct number to try and contact someone from Google but haven't been able to find one that works. I have no idea what. It was suspended in the first place and got no more information in the denial email. Do you have any ideas for me to get this fixed? I would definitely reach out to Chuck. He's helped a lot with the corporate locations because we had one or two of these happen there. He essentially said he immediately sent a whole bunch of proof of address. That's usually always what these are getting flagged for.

And in terms of utilities, credit card statements, anything to prove that that is your address. That's a lot of times like 90% of the time why these are getting denied and suspended. So if you still have an email address in addition to the form, I'd recommend doing that.

Yeah, that's what I'd recommend for now. And.

Chuck, I know you're listening to this. Maybe reach out to Jake and just send him exactly what you did. But I know you've posted the Facebook group before.

Even if Chuck, maybe make a post inside the Facebook group so people can search this in the future and just call it like Google Google listing suspension and list out exactly what we've done to get these reversed pretty quickly. And again very quickly. Some of them take it within a couple days. We have seen some takes 2, 3, 4 weeks to get turned around.

This is from Arnold.

Hey Mike, we have two questions about PvP and rain delays. When an employee is halfway through a mowing route and it starts raining, should they clock out while they wait for the rain to stop? Should this break be a manual adjustment? If the brake is an hour or even two, should this change how we approach the situation? I would not recommend them clocking out. They're still working for you. Like they're not doing their own thing. So they should be clocked in and keeping it that way, obviously it's gonna affect their P4P and weather is part of, you know, can definitely affect P4P but they should not be clocking out in my opinion.

Two, sometimes our guys work a full day on door hanger routes in the spring. Caveat. Okay, so again, the reason I want number one, legally you have to. So I would not be skirting this issue secondarily is you want your guys to want to be out working. So if you make it to where it's like, hey, look, you're on base pay, they're not. They're going to hate rain as much as you because they don't want to be at base pay. Especially if they're high performer because they're like, okay, I've been making 22, 23, 24, okay, now I'm at 17 because of the stupid rain. They don't want that. They want to. They'll push to be out in the field working and keep pushing through it even as much as possible. Whereas if you have lower performers that are hitting base pay or you're an hourly, they want to SAP it for all it's worth. When there's a rain delay. Sometimes our guys work number two, Sometimes our guys work a full day on door hanger routes in the spring. Would you add a manual adjustment for their whole shift or just leave them clocked in the whole time and approve their shift with no manual with no adjustment added since they will be at base pay anyways? We've watched a lot of training videos on PPP but still struggling to find a clear explanation when manual adjustments should be used. Okay, so let me just say this. We are adding a feature on manual adjustments to make this a lot more clear. And that is when you add a manual adjustment, it's going to ask you do you want this to affect P4P and base pay or base pay only or P4P only? So there's going to be check boxes next to a manual adjustment. That way, for example, in this case you want it to affect basically both, right? Whereas like a damage case, you only want it to affect P4P. So this is going to be cleared up a lot. I think manual adjustments, for example, this case you want it to affect both their base pay and you want it to be on their. Because. Because you what you don't want this to do is get them to clock in and have no budget hours because then it crushes their a chance for P4P for the whole pay period, even if they do one or two days. So this is a great question we've got. We've seen this happen a few times and so we are addressing it directly by just having it full optionality. Where when you make a manual adjustment, positive or negative, you can affect both pay for like the, the base pay and or the performance dollars only. So which would be P4P. So that's coming. I'd say just wait for that. It make it so much more clear because in situations like this you do need it to affect your base pay as well as.

The P for P. So.

Let me make sure I'm addressing this correctly.

Yeah. Because like right now the manual adjustments only affect P for P. Right. So that's what you gotta be careful of.

So down the road what we're gonna make it. Let's just clear. So I'm hoping next week. Hoping next week we have that done. I have to look at our backlog but it's either next week or the week after we'll have that and I think that'll be. It'll clear things up just so much easier than trying to explain what should and shouldn't be. And if you do clock time versus instead of manual adjustments.

Connor from Evansville, Indiana, what is your response to a customer? Whatever they want, ever they want to, whenever they want to purchase materials. My thought, our material markup is often where we have overhead recovery, small form. My other thought is that if we aren't familiar with the material that the customer is requesting that we use and that's just a mess because we can't warranty.

We cannot simplify because we aren't familiar with the material and just other concerns of that nature. Do you tell the customer no because if they buy the material that we don't make as much money and we're not interested in making less. It's not about even the material markup. These other concerns you're bringing bringing up is what you'd be talking about with a customer. Right? Like the fact of the matter is overhead recovery, we bake some of it into overhead into materials, you bake some of it into labor, etc. Estimate fees, dump fees, etc, however.

That the customer doesn't care about that. What I would be saying is like just make a policy like we don't. We only use the materials that we, we supply. And if someone ever asked you why, it's like so we know what they are. Our guys know how to, how to properly install them. They're trained correctly on those materials, plants, types of bulk materials, whatever it is and there's no.

Issues or issues created or errors created because it's unfamiliar. And then furthermore, like hey, we have project management in place, we have scheduling in place and we don't want. We cannot rely on someone else to be bring our materials without us. Without us having full control of the supply chain. Right. So that's how I'd say it. I don't like working with customers that they want to do the supplies because I can't schedule the deliveries. I don't know if they're going to bring the right amount. It's not even. It's really not about the material markup. It really isn't. It's really about scheduling and et cetera. Because if someone really, if it was really about the money, I would just say, hey, charge several more e fees to get your overhead recovery, put some more budget hours in there and you're fine. But it's not about that. It's about scheduling. Especially. You grow and scale up. Like, you do not want to be dealing with project management issues of like, oh, they, they said they were going to bring four yards, but they only brought two. Okay, now what? We're going to twiddle our thumb. The guys will get super mad on P4P.

Right?

So if you're going to do P4P, you better make sure you can control budgeted hours.

Otherwise you're going to be off a lot.

So I wouldn't recommend taking other materials from other contractors or like, you know, the, the, the. The customer being in charge of supply chain management. So. All right, everyone, hope you have a fantastic rest of your day and we'll see you tomorrow. Take care.