Mike Minutes Mastermind 03/31/2023

Hey, everyone.

Hope you're doing super well.

Click announcement, and then we'll jump into questions.

Let me just put this into the Facebook.

I don't know why I call it the Facebook.

So weird.

Technically, that's what it was originally called.

All right, save that. No, don't open that up.

Sick.

Boom. Okay, refresh.

Live. Let's do this announcement. If you have command center doing your invoicing and you are in the invoicing department, they will have that done for you tomorrow on Saturday.

So that's not always a guarantee, but we are going to get that done for you all tomorrow. This is the first, so.

Liz wanted me to tell you that.

Okay.

Typically don't do full service on the weekends, but that's gonna happen for everyone that is in the invoicing department tomorrow on Saturday.

That's the only announcement I had. Let me triple check.

I had a good. I was talking with Ryan Payne about thinking about overall, kind of like what your cost of office admin slash command center cost should be.

I'm a big fan of trying to make sure that your estimate fee covers that cost.

And I typically see kind of around 10% of gross revenue.

Being a place under. That is good. Once you've hit profit mode, if you're growing, that can be significantly higher because you're doing a lot more leads, a lot more estimates, a lot more phone calls, et cetera. Once you're in profit mode, that's kind of a good benchmark. And he and I are talking about a little bit with percentage of payroll. So kind of looking at like 33% of. Of on P4P, like going direct labor. And then if you add 10% to that, for example, it'd be 43%. That would be. Then if you actually took your look at your total payroll, if you have an office staff or including command center costs. And so that's just something to think about. I know some of you really, like, jump into the numbers, and that was.

Something I've been taught that.

Okay.

All right, let's jump into question.

Cool. Let me zoom in. There looks six of them.

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Whoa. Mike Andes. What in the world is this?

Someone put my name in here. That's hilarious. I guess technically you can put anything in there. Have you all considered hiring someone to go out and go out and hang door hangers? In theory, if someone can hang 600 door hangers a day and get five to 10 estimates accepted, wouldn't it be worth it? Obviously the owner can do it if they have the time, but also would be able to get more out and potentially get hung when you're working in the field. Just want to hear your all thoughts.

Thanks.

Yeah, absolutely. Can it's a one of those positions where if you're going to do I definitely recommend doing some form of P4P like number of door hangers given out but again you got a quality controls because they could just take 500 and dump them in the in the garbage bin and tell them tell you that they were delivered. I had that happen to me where I paid someone. They just literally threw them in the garbage and I paid a bunch of money for nothing. And then if you don't do that then you are going to have.

Issues with them just like taking their time and walking super slow, etc. What I'd probably recommend is doing something along the lines of giving them a base pay hourly and then every accepted estimate in that route giving them like 50 bucks or whatever it is because then it's a matter it's speed is important for them because the more they get out the higher likelihood of getting that extra bonus that might be worth it for sure. There's a. In terms of the overall question of whether or not to hire someone to do it, I would say you'd only do this during periods of high demand because when demand is low, these door hangers will go from 600 a day getting five to 15 estimates to zero.

Or one very quickly.

So I'd say there's only in most of our markets four to six weeks where hiring this out would actually make sense because you have such a high demand. And again this goes back to if you can do this during high demand periods, that's when you can crush your customer acquisition cost. Right. So like the results that you're seeing in the people posting on the Facebook group right now are not going to be seen in even a few months. Right. That's my biggest concern when I go and start a new location in June is like it's like a little bit late into the spring rush, but definitely not like two, three months ago. You're definitely not getting you know, that kind of response rate. Right. So yeah, I would capitalize it. And again it comes down to if you have the capacity. And yeah, I truly believe that like doing instant cord toy hangers there, there's probably no one in your market doing it versus 5, 10, 15 other people doing Google Ads, Facebook ads, et cetera.

So it's a Blue ocean, baby.

Kyle Tarvin, that was a great question. Whoever wrote that last question, just fantastic. I think, you know, I think they should get an award. I don't know who did that. I did not. Okay. Kyle Tarvin, with all our equipment being stolen the other day, I have a feeling we are paying too much for our insurance policy if we won't use it. Besides for car accidents, this is for our more location. Can you look over my policy and give me your thoughts and some of the things we could drop pictured. Ooh, this is fun.

All right, let's see this.

Okay.

Here.

So it's your cord. You got a million and then 2 million. You got a single limit of 500,000. What's that difference? Each occurrence combined single limit. Okay, gotcha. Okay. Bottle injury, medical payments. A thousand.

That's kind of weird.

They have medical payments with a thousand dollars. Like what can I cover someone to come put a band aid on you?

So this is your auto insurance, right? So this is not your.

Oh, I see general labels on top. Got it. Okay. Got it.

Okay, cool, cool.

I'm trying to look for your.

Your deductible.

I don't see it.

I'm looking for the deductible. I don't see it. Looks like you got workers comp. Great. Automobile liability, Great. You don't have full coverage already. So I would say this is probably, I wouldn't go too much lower than this. Like you have 500,000 for your accident stuff. Like a liability perspective. You don't have anything in terms of beyond that. Maybe you could save a little here, but that's not gonna cost you a lot. It's only a thousand dollar limit. Like that's nothing in terms of up top here. That's when potentially like this medical 10,000. I don't know what data tech. I think that's like data compromisation. 25,000. You might want to drop that.

I have yet to see companies pay out on data protection stuff because there's so many clauses they can get out of it because of like for example, if someone's using Stripe.

And they get that gets breached. I've seen so many of these. These insurance companies say oh well, this is stripe's problem. This is not a matter of your general liability. And then they go after Stripe kind of thing. So most of this is pretty good. I would take a look at some of these two million dollar limits and see if they could be down to a million potentially. What your.

Your, your, your deductible is the biggest thing right because insurance companies know that if you have a high deductible, you're not going to use it. And so if you're not going to use it and you don't plan on using it, so you don't raise your, your premiums, you should have high deductibles. So like I try to do max deductibles, you 2,500, 5,000, et cetera. Because if it's $1,000 issue, I'm not going to put it on my, on my, on my insurance, right? Because I end up paying for that like big time. It's like we had that massive issue $30,000 fence that we cut down I've talked about before that was covered by insurance. But I ended up having my premium triple for the past, for like three, four years. So I ended up paying that, that for that fence. Probably 20 to 30,000 extra anyways on premium, right?

So yeah, just keep that in mind.

I don't know if this is the same person, but if you're only paying 89, you're doing fine. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. If you're paying 500 and you have two employees, that's when you start looking at, okay, deductibles, the limits. But $89 a month, like, I don't know if this is the same person. I can't see, sorry. But if you're paying $89 a month for this coverage, you're doing just fine. You're basically at liability only. You probably have some pretty high deductibles, et cetera. So I'm not suggesting anyone do high deductibles, by the way. I'm only saying do high deductibles. If you don't plan for, to use it for every little thing, which you really don't want to, just for liability. Yeah, it's not bad. $89 a month for commercial insurance. If you have 2 million, 1 million and you have some other stuff in there, not bad. You could probably get down to 60 by like taking some limits down, taking out the medical payments of 10,000, for example. But like, that's not bad. It's just not. So think of insurance. In my opinion, think of insurance as I don't have the cash, this could really damage the business and set me back a year or two by having a, if I have to pay this out of pocket. But if this is like a thousand five hundred dollars issue, someone steals something out of your truck, someone backs into your truck, I just don't recommend.

Using insurance. Okay, so this is Kurt Kyler, which is not the person that I just showed the policy to. About.

Okay, just so I'm clear.

Yeah, okay. But yeah, if you're a solo operator paying between fifty and a hundred bucks, you're probably fine per month. If you want to shop around, use a link and go to Next Insurance from the deals page. You might be able to save a little bit, but I would not get super in the weeds between 60 and 80. Like, if you can have better limits. Better, better. Like it's not going to cost you a lot more a lot of times. So especially when you're small, when you're bigger. Like our insurance used to be 3,000amonth. And then because that thing fell off and I switched the next insurance, I think we're down to 8 or 900 for the Bellam shop. I can't remember exactly, but it's like two grand less a month than it was a year ago.

So.

Liability goes up dramatically when you have employees.

So, like when I worked at State Farm, I basically knew that we were higher in terms of price for commercial insurance. So I couldn't with a good conscience tell people to use us for a commercial because we're just so expensive compared to at the carriers. That's why I recommend either using something like Next Insurance or a broker that has a whole bunch of different carriers so you can get better pricing. Kyle Tarvin, what do you think about creating a small yard sign, smaller than our regular mowing signs, to stick in the customer's lawn after you complete an estimate, saying something to the effect of estimate provided by Augusta?

You're gonna go through a lot of these, right? So, like, you know, the Bellingham shop would go through if, say, these cost five bucks. That cost me about.

1200-1500 dollars a month. I don't know if there's worth on that. I don't know. To be perfectly honest, I've never tried it. Feel free if you would like to design one, put together and let us know how it goes. I just think that that twelve hundred dollars, fifteen hundred would probably be spent elsewhere. Better, like either going to the team if you're in profit mode or if you're in growth mode, spending on doing more door hangers. Right. I just don't know because there's obviously value to having a yard sign. But I think you might get your customers kind of ticked off. Like they haven't accepted the estimate and you're putting something there in their yard. They might not like that. I Don't know though. Land Smith, Tallahassee, Florida I was going, I was thinking about the crazy customer acquisition cost that seems to be coming with door hangers. Have y' all ever considered hiring someone? Okay, I think we caught this. Yeah, we, we caught the first one. Sorry, Lynn. I saw your question came in right after yesterday's. Oh, you just landed. You just told on yourself, I think because you did the other question where you put Mike Andes as the name and now you put your name and had the same question. So unless it's pure coincidence, I'm going to guess that Landon was the one that put my name on it. Let's go see we figure these things out eventually.

Yeah, we talked about this. Great. Yeah, you're only going to get that kind of return during periods of high demand, which I would recommend. When you have high demand, that's when you can go after more broad based marketing and more of like a larger net things like Google performance Max where when you show a video a lot of people need your service. Demand is high. That's when it's going to actually be effective. During periods when there's not a lot of demand either really hot or it's in the winter. Like that's when you need more targeted with things like Google where they have intent to buy because there's just not as many people needing your service. Darrell from Boone's Creek, what do you think with customers that haven't added a card and you need to invoice their mowing.

So we've sent the credit card ask template to and still haven't added it. Just send them their invoice so they can pay it themselves. Typically we just charge all cards for a current mowing at the end of the. Yeah, so I know some people have a really hard set on hey, you must do recurring. You must have a credit card and file. We push it pretty hard. 90, 95% of people do it. The other percentage, it's like a matter of if you pay really quickly like using the link and then you pay with a credit card or you send it a check right away and we get within a few days. I'm okay with it at this point. I'm okay with it.

The person that goes 7, 14, 21 days after invoice being accepted and that's when you just got to tighten up your automations and eventually.