Mike Minutes Mastermind 03/31/2025

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to another Mike Mintz mastermind. It is Monday, March 31, end of Q1.

Quick couple announcements. First off, I sent everyone email and put it in the Facebook group for our very our guys Quarter two, 2025 roundtable will be a Zoom call for all the owners and general managers that will be here in a few weeks. So check that out. It's on a Thursday evening. That invite is in your email. It is also on the Facebook group. I'll send reminders we get closer to it. Another reminder because tomorrow is when a few of the departments are.

Ending at Command center. I know the one that kind of affects the most for most people is the invoicing. There's only, I think there's only about 15 people who are using it. 15 to 20. But if you would like. Today is the main focus of the office hours that Nick Reed is having with the owners and it's live on Zoom. So you could do your, your, your invoicing this evening with him or have any questions whatsoever. You can go over those live on Zoom call. So contact him if you need to. If you'd like to be, you know, do your invoicing with him this evening. You can do it. So he'll be sending out another message here in a couple hours to remind everyone that you can hop on that live stream on Zoom and he's going to be focusing this evening on invoicing. Each office hours will be either focusing on a specific topic or certain person that he's kind of doing some coaching with and then people can ask questions and etc. For the office hours. So that is very good. So keep an eye out for that message later today if you would like to be kind of get some hand holding on the invoicing and then also as always invoicing and all the other departments that are being dropped, there is training on the academy from that individual department lead to make sure that you are taken care of.

All right, let's go ahead and get started.

We got six questions today. Let's go ahead and get started. First one is Mr. Anonymous. Is the two thousand dollar referral bonus thing still in effect? Is it only based on the question on the initial call or throughout the decision making process for a new owner? Yeah, when someone is potentially joining, think about joining Augusta. It asked them like did anyone kind of push you in this? I think it's like was there any member of Augusta Nation that impacted this decision to potentially join? And if they put their name there and then join, yeah, there's a $2,000 referral bonus that will go to that, that individual. So if someone's out there actively like promoting it and they mention it specifically on that initial call as a, as a reason they, they joined, then yes, we are, we are very thrilled and happy. We've handed out quite a few of those.

So yeah, thank you. Number two is Andrew from Bentonville. Just voicing my opinion here. I think when CC is accepting door hangers or instant quotes come in, they should not send the credit card ask email. Okay so this is an automation. This is based upon a, an estimate being accepted. They are getting the initial we are so excited acceptance email. Then they set up your payment information and then a thank you welcome email with scheduling and also ask for payment information. Hey, it's just me but I think three emails before their initial service is a bit much. I would rather skip CC asking for their credit card and then ask for it when I send them the email and the scheduling. So you just want to modify so CC is not sending them that. That's all in your automations.

So we're so excited. Yeah, like what you could do just eliminate the we're excited one for example.

And then that way just like as soon as they get it it would just say like hey, we're so super excited. Put your car information below and then you whenever you can get to it, putting it actually on the schedule, doing the thank you and welcome. That way there's only two. So that's probably. It'd really just be a matter of modifying your sequence. Keep in mind from the customer's point of view, they're going to click accept, they're going to get one email saying hey, we're super excited, we're going to get you on the schedule. And then they get another email right after like at the same time saying put your payment information in here. So you know you could combine those two. Totally fine.

Cool. The only reason to not really combine those is the fact that here come in June once we have the ability to actually get the card information on file from the website then it's gonna be you don't want it asking for card information when they've already entered that it's already in their account because then they'll be confused there too. So that'd be the caveat there. But depending on if you require cards on file and regard and depending on automations you just go in there and change those two emails and combine them if you would like.

Dylan Wirtz Is there a way to fully automate invoicing the way we do it. We invoice weekly for all recurring services daily for any projects I have had CC doing it. So we follow their systems for invoicing. I was curious if there's a way to automate invoicing so it continues to do that. That same thing and charges projects daily and recurring services weekly. Or if that is not possible, I asked copilot support, but I don't think they fully understood my question. Side note, is it also possible to have a couple customers be automatically invoiced monthly? I have a few commercial customers that would be invoiced monthly instead. My concern is there's no way to do that since the automatically weekly invoice will likely override if I set up automated monthly invoicing on their specific account.

Okay, give me one second. That last part is the only part I have a question about. Give me. Let me just check on my account.

Give me one second.

Open up.

Customers.

Because yeah, like I think you can customize it for each person, but it shouldn't override it unless you're using the company defaults. One second.

There all at the first part. Quickly. So what I would probably do is do. Do your weekly. You want weekly. Weekly for occurring. I'd probably do everything automatically. Sending invoices on weekly and charging on weekly. And what I would probably do is in the daily ones, I would probably just go in there really quick and just change it from being a draft and then sending those. The reason is because what you don't want happening if it's immediate is the cut, the employee clicking complete. You do not really want the job completed. For example, like a two or three day project and the customer getting an invoice. So I would probably just do. Hey, you can completely automate the weekly side and then on the daily side it'd be a drafted invoice if they accidentally click complete on the job.

One second here, let me see. Because the last part of this question, I need to check.

Settings.

Okay.

I see, I see, I see. So auto enable. Auto sending. I think you could do this. Yeah, you could totally do this. So you could do auto enable. I'm guessing. Are you trying to send it or charge it? Trying to automate invoicing. So okay. So yeah, so okay, so basically if you go to customer on the customer profile. Oops.

Oops. If you go to the customer profile, go to invoice settings, you can enable like auto sending invoices and it's going to ask you like do it daily. Do you want Weekly do it monthly. So you should be able to edit this for every single customer. What I would probably do in your case, Dylan, if you're trying to automate this as much as possible, I would do automatic for weekly and then if there's a project I would probably just do that one where I'd go in there manually and send it. Because what you want to be careful of is you change that one to daily for that customer. Well now you've got to change it back to weekly if they have other services. And to my knowledge there is not a way to be able to say okay, one time jobs I want to go on this payment frequency and recurring jobs I want to go on this other frequency. I don't believe there's a way to do that. I've never used that but I'm like looking through. I don't think there's a way to do that to be honest with you. Defaults?

Yeah, I don't think it's going to be possible. So yeah, you really can't choose or distinguishing between weekly or recurring jobs and one time jobs, the frequency of billing. So I would probably like I said go to weekly and then I would do the projects. I would just send those out each day if there were one ones that were complete as I was kind of doing my end of day scrolls of the dispatch board. And I still think it's a really good habit even in terms of just like looking for upsells, dispatcher notes, initial modes that need to be adjusted, things like that. So that would be my 2 cents.

This one's from Lawrenceville. Hey Mike, I got an email from Google Ads to increase my daily ad spend. Google has been working very well for us. Our budget originally was $30 per day and then Google recommended increase it to 60 which is still in our marketing budget. Now they say double it again or we will not show up as often. It also says we are limited by our budget so we don't show as often. I couldn't believe that anyone around me would be spending $120 a day. So it seemed like a money grab. What are your thoughts? Picture attached. Okay, so the big, the big thing we're looking at here is what is your cost per lead as you raise your prices or you raise your spend.

Oh man, I hate how they do this. Sorry, it's really hard for me to scroll, zoom in and out. I'm going to have to use my cursor. Okay. Cost per, click clock, click through, rate. You got three conversions. How much did you Spend like a. Where's the actual. Can I just see the spend, folks? Oh, this is on a mobile device. Whoa. Why is this so weird? Okay, give me a second. Sorry guys. Give me one second. Okay, optimize your budget.

Okay, add a. Whoa, mercy. Okay, this is just a little funky. Give me a second. So $2 cost per click. $2 multiplied by 160, $300. You're paying quite a bit. Oh, there it is. My bad. I didn't see this. $125 cost, click cost per lead. That's a lot. And I do think it is because you are spending so much. I bet like you were. If you spend more, yes, you can always get one more click. But is that click actually accurate and is the cost of that click worth it? So if I was spending $125.

Per lead, I would probably not be spending more money on that lead that that channel. So I would highly recommend hopping on the call with Nick on like an office hours this afternoon or next week. On Mondays he does it every single Monday he'll go through your account. But like yes, Google will always tell you to spend more and spending more will always get you more clicks. It's just a matter of is that click actually worth it? Like if I spend a thousand dollars more, you got one click, great. But it's not worth that. So judge, they're obviously, you know, trying to upsell you. So.

I would personally not be spending that much money. And if you're at 60, I would imagine you'd get the same three acquisition.

Conversions leads doing the $30. And if you go from 60 back down to 30 now and you're getting leads from more that 50 to $60 range, very good. I would be putting, I would be happy with that. Now would I put more money on it? Not necessarily Google because it's intent based marketing. I can't dump money on it and increase the amount of leads. That's why I like Door Ha and even Facebook if I can figure out those channels. Because if I want to scale it, I can spend more, reach more people and be able to get more customers. With Google you are limited by how many people are actually searching for that keyword. So just be very careful with this. And I'd recommend also to watch the video from.

Evergrow from the last year's conference down in Kentucky. There's a presentation on it and he shows where to look at on your Google Ads account which looks like you're going through some sort of plugin. Maybe that's GA4 but inside of your Google Ads account, you'll be able to see like, okay, am I over overspending in this one specific area? So I definitely would watch that, but I would not be spending more money on a channel that's doing $125 cost per lead in the middle, like as we're going into spring rush. So that should be much more in the realm of things 30 to 50 if you're following the the done for you ads and you're spending optimally. Mr. Anonymous, do you have any plans to improve tips and copilot a date? We have received $53 in tips and collect $6,000 overall. It has been years since I used our book, but I remember something like 3 to 4% of total tips, total revenue being tips. I think perfecting a feature like this makes significant revenue differences. Even if we told the customers 100% was going to employee bonuses, I would be okay with that. Thanks for your thoughts. Yeah, so the challenging part is when you have a credit card on file because it is. As long as you're sending out invoices, we see this percentage higher. But when you're charging someone's card, you usually don't want to send them an invoice. You don't want to like bog their in their, their email in with a whole bunch of paid invoice receipts. So they don't actually ever get an email. They don't even have the option to send tips. That being said, overall, yeah, the feature needs to be improved. We have this down the road when it comes to other parts of the customer portal and we'll be looking at this. I actually would like to tackle it somehow around recurring revenue to be able to still make this a little more accessible. So when that time comes, I'll definitely be asking for some ideas. Like, hey, if someone has a credit card file, how do we still get tips out of them without necessarily sending them a paid invoice receipt? Because that paid invoice receipt, if that causes them to cancel more often and it does, it increases churn. I do not want to have anything to do with it. So I'm a big fan. Like if you're sent, if you're sending out invoices, paid invoice receipts to not do that, especially if you're doing daily or weekly billing. And.

All of that being said, yes, this is like definitely on the horizon. But as more and more people have put like required cards on file, you see a direct correlation between cards on file and less tips. Because if someone is paying an invoice and they can add a tip. It's just a nicer flow versus someone already has a paid invoice they're not even going to open up the invoice like the email, they're not going to open it up. So bit of a which one do you want kind of thing.

So but yes, this is on the horizon. The current tip flow can absolutely be improved and it will be when it comes to the invoices and the other parts of the customer portal. We've really focused on estimates inside the customer portal last week but each of those parts of the customer portal will have to be done the same way and that's like really thinking about like what's actually useful, what's the best workflow, et cetera.

Johnny from Denver. Hey Mike, I remember a few weeks ago you talked about CC handling to dos for us. Can you explain the workflow or where I can find it? They are clearing out all my TO dos daily even if there aren't, if they aren't complete and ones I create myself. It's caused some confusion. I miss, miss some of them. I'm assuming Johnny, you might be on the the dispatch board review department so feel free Johnny to specifically reach out help GustAlongerServices.com and like see why that part is happening because it sounds like you're asking a service they're doing it and then you don't know they're doing it. But I would say in terms of to DOS in general though is once a to do is completed it does fire back to command center or yourself. You can set this all up in your automations and they're going to be able to see as of last week we now have the dispatcher notes inside the email and so that way they can actually see. Okay, is this something I actually need to address? Like for example you can go back and forth now on a specific topic with them and they're able to address it from you. Just leaving dispatcher notes in A to do. So they leave a to do to call back a customer because they want to make changes to an estimate. You can then in the dispatcher note say hey work order change, please change this X, Y and Z. Move this off of the estimate whatever they will then now get that ticket back to them. So in terms of handling to DOS for you, anytime you mark complete on A to do they're going to be notified. If you want them to take certain actions, put it in the dispatcher notes. If you don't want them to take any Actions in the dispatcher note just say no action required. So.

Yes I might actually have.

I think there's training on this but if not I should update it because the new dispatcher notes.

Merge tag helps a lot. Give me one second training or to do handling from cc. Okay I will see if we have that Johnny and if we do not I'll make sure they make this because last week having the dispatcher notes as a merge tag saves a lot of time for the office this because now when they get that to do completed from you they can immediately see like do I even need to go in your account or is this like you just completed the task and we're done like no action required. And so this saved them a lot of time. Super helpful. So like every single two that's being complete we will save an additional like 10 to 15 seconds of command which is very helpful over the course of the entire day. So yeah in terms of like how the workflow happens every time you mark complete on to do assuming your automations are sent to go to Command center they will be getting notified and they'll be making sure there's nothing like follow up that is required around complaints, customer resolution stuff.

Refunds, anything like that. You can just put in the in the dispatcher notes of the to do and then they would get that information and take action on it. But now it'll save that time where if you put no action required they won't even have to go into your account. They'll see it in the email quickly clear it out of the account system.

So and that is all she wrote. All right everyone, I hope you have a fantastic Monday spring rush full fledged. A whole bunch of people started their first modes today, perfectly coinciding with several of the more refined least used departments inside Command center being offloaded. It's going to allow for them to free up their capacity and just make sure that as everyone gets started with their spring rush that we match the capacity with the agents here at Command Center. So appreciate you all, hope you all have a fantastic rest of your evening. We'll stay in touch, take care.