Mike Minutes Mastermind 04/01/2024

Hello, gust nation. Happy April 1st this April Fool's Day. Just a little heads up if anyone does anything stupid to you today. I was trying to think about something creative, but I couldn't come up with anything that would not be annoying. So. All right, let's go and get this kicked off. I was a little earlier than usual, so sorry for people on the West Coast, I'm on the east coast, so let me just put this into Facebook.

Everyone had a fantastic Easter.

All right, there we go.

We were traveling. I hate traveling.

All right. I don't sleep great on traveling.

No real specific reason. Just don't sleep much.

Let's get this kicked off. I got how many questions?

Okay, six questions. I don't think there's really any announcements. There was some talk on the Facebook group about a lot of applications coming in. That's good. The past couple of months, we've been trying to hone in the SEO on the applications page. We don't run ads against it, but trying to make it more friendly from an SEO perspective to people that have watched my videos has been something we've been working on so that they're ever looking for a job.

We rank a little bit higher. Seems like it's working. It's tough to really track that, but it does seem like a lot of people are saying they're getting a lot of applications just organically from their website. And so we've been trying to grease the wheels on that. And it's also just a matter of the economy in general. Like people are. There's higher, more people looking for work. Unless of course, you ask the government who's saying that there's no jobs being accepted than ever before. But I think it's partly the economy and then partly we've been working the past few months on greasing the wheels to that page of the website for people that have ever watched one of my videos. Now, will they ever remember what that. Would they watch one of my videos? Probably not, because less than. Less than 5% of people that are have an impression that I can track actually watch a video, but it likely means that they at least sometimes saw something of Augusta or Mike Candies. So my end all down the road is to drive huge amounts of traffic from. From my social media to all of our pages and have a really good onboarding process to get just a ton of applicants for us all the time. I think it'll probably take us a couple more years for it to be there's probably, based on what I have seen, the amount of people applying. There's probably 10 of Augusta Nation that could live off of just their applications coming in through Augusta. LongerServices.com from a applications perspective, my hope is that down the road let's get 80 to 90% of us don't have to run indeed ads because we're just getting a massive amount of traffic. And I talked about this with Dr. Kashi and he said that this is very possible as we keep growing the social media because that's what they've done with acquisition.com and Alex and Layla is like they don't have to look for people to hire because there's a huge amount of traffic coming to those pages and they can target their audience and get great talent. So that would be my goal. Also the fact that because we are doing more entertaining content that actually appeals to not just the business owners, it appeals to the, the employees, which is a great source of traffic for all of us as owners to get those employees that are watching that type of content as our as on our team. So.

We'Ve been working up for several months. I'm glad to see some people are starting to see some results. But my hope down the road is that we basically remove that bottleneck using the social media as our top top of the funnel. Like there's just no way we're going to try to boil the ocean of like driving leads to us. As for mowing customers from my social media, there's just no way to make it actually make sense financially unless you had like 5 to 10 million subscribers and every video is getting millions of views and you're doing like customer related lawn care jobs then you drive leads from customers. So but I do think I can take out the bottleneck in the next couple years of people applying and employees just through the website. So that's my goal.

And so I know like sometimes the media like the turnaround is like how is it kind of relating to Augusta sometimes. But if we can get huge amount of eyeballs on that and then drive traffic.

The amount of people who just click on the application link from Mike Andy's page is huge. It's insane. It's thousands every single month. So I just want to keep having that go higher and higher and eventually just have it where all of Us are getting 10, 15 applications a month.

And don't have to worry about paying. Indeed. Or you know, where's the best talent coming from? Those are always going to be your best talent people that are coming from the content. So yeah, glad to see that's Getting a little bit of traction. I just, I anticipate just get better and better as we hone in the SEO. But more importantly is like the, the social media side of things gets bigger.

All right, where are we going? Here we go. We got six.

Is that showing okay? It is, but I need to make this screen a little smaller. There you go. Okay.

Numero uno, Nick Davidson from Hudsonville. And Nick, I did submit your video you had posted on the Facebook group about. I don't even remember it was. I just forwarded along to Steven George because I think there was a specific ticket they're working on at. Oh yeah, stuff was popping up in your estimates.

I I literally. They already have a ticket. They're working with command center about it why it's happening. I think it might have to do with the multiple account thing. Anyways I I for that him and they're working on that. Just FYI. I've got a handle on commercial service pricing, but I'm a bit shaken residential especially with our focus on boosting recurring mowing services, our close rage ratio for residential isn't where I want it to be. Aiming for 85 per hour.

Do you suggest sticking with our current pricing through the season to gather data or should I be checking out the competition to adjust our rates? How do others quickly dial in with the local market will bear for residential mowing for context, in our small loans, Instant quote is 45.67. Medium size is 52 or 78 and large size is 70 and 117. We typically start mowing until the typically don't start mowing until the second week of April per perhaps it's just too early to tell. Yeah, the. I just, it's the. It's the same question, same answer every time. And that is your close ratio determines this. Right. So the challenging part with instant quotes is you're not going to get a great pulse on your close ratio because most people will not submit a close bid. And unfortunately I can't even track this.

In terms of how many people like see the price and then just don't submit. Command center does get a good chunk of them. I have like, just based upon like natural human behavior. I think most people, if they see a bid they don't like they're not going to submit it. However, it does say like we will manually review it if they click decline. So we'll see. I just think that like your close ratio is gonna be higher when you use instant quotes but. But it could be artificially that way because people see the price, they think it's too high and they just bail and they never submit.

So what I would say is over the course of time you're going to see like a trend of like, okay, if no one's accepting and I'm not getting any estimates accepted, lower your price, you will see the increase. But the bottom line is hit capacity and then you can raise prices. Right? So I would say in general it's like lower prices to the point at which it might be a little uncomfortable if you're trying to be in growth mode. Hit capacity, raise prices. So like I really don't care how low someone's prices need to be to hit capacity. Like even the Bellingham shop, I think they move prices down on their medium MO by like $5 because like they need to hit capacity. They got such a hit so bad last year with not hitting capacity and recurring mows and because everything was mismanaged that like they, they went into the, the spring rush this year was like probably half the amount of recurring mowing as they did last year. That's brutal. So like they had to lower prices and they will hit capacity and then raise prices, but until you like just, just hit capacity, that's like the bottom line. Like I would say, Nick, if you're like I'm trying to grow and like, like I have a lot of capacity, I would move your prices down to several dollars just to make sure. Okay, yes, a little uncomfortable. But again, all of your extra like your, your margin from where you're at now to your capacity is so much higher you can afford to go lower in price, fill the capacity. And then when you're like I can't take more jobs on raise them all by 10 or 15 per cut on your new mows like for instant quotes. So yeah.

Sorry, sometimes I scroll down on these just to see how long of a. Of a question is. Would it be possible to get some sort of email verification on copilot or would be alerted when an email is undeliverable? I did get a notice notified about some hotmail and icloud emails that don't deliver. The last time I did a one click mass email. Yeah, we do this on mass emails. Perhaps this is already on the roadmap. Emails can be so hard to accurately take down over the phone and I've been running into typos more often they are discovered when sending to an estimate sending an email through my Augusta Gmail and have them bounce back.

Send an email. Yeah, I got it. So you can see in your web Hooks if an email is undeliverable. So if you go and, and go you can see if it, if the email is undeliverable we only will send you an email for mass emails. I'm trying to think if I made this.

Trying to think, give me one second. I'm trying to think. I'm pretty sure I made this where down the road we are going to build this in for transactional email too for like estimates and invoices where it also emails you. Because I remember like this is a bit of annoyance for all CRMs we've ever used and I was like you go to do your follow up, follow up call the next day and you realize like a day or two later that like the invoice, the estimate never got to them because they misspelled their email in the form. And so we have it for mass email and I'm 99% sure I made, I made this for like down the road for us to do this for transactional email which is estimates, invoices, etc, which would also email you as well.

So yes, good point. And then you can if you really want to for now manually check this. Just go in and see if the email was delivered or not. You can see it if you go to email templates and then email the history.

Kyle Tarvin Purely hypothetical question. On an observation, I had, I had no plans on doing this. Okay, so it's purely hypothetical based on observation. I have no plans on doing it. Okay, here we go.

I've noticed the food industry grows through acquisitions to where a few large brands control lots of other sub brands. Personally I think it is very smart as it gives the consumer the appearance of choice but in reality you're buying from the same handful of conglomerates. I'm wondering if a lawn company was to buy a bunch of local competitors and keep their name and branding, integrate those purchase companies and De Gusa systems if that would be a viable model. Thinking like running each company as its own entity, office staff, branding, etc but they all answer to the parent company. The consumer would be none the wiser and the parent company could soak up market share through each individual sub company. Obviously this seems like a logistical clerical nightmare but curious your thoughts? Yeah, so this usually works well in oligopoly. So an oligopoly is more than two big players but it's usually in more concentrated industries. So this happens a lot in food service, this happens a lot in hotel chains. It's like companies like Hyatt, companies like.

Wow, I'm just blanking.

Wow, I'm just blanking on names for hotels right now. Sorry, I'm a little tired. But they're all owned by like several large players.

The thing is with lawn care landscaping, because everyone has such a small fragmented piece, the market, usually it doesn't make sense buying people out like this. This is why you don't see this happening a lot.

In service industries. You see this like in franchising, but it's totally different. But in terms of like your local market seeing this, you might have like. Everyone always thinks they have like a massive piece of the market. All of us massively underestimate how big your local market is. Even a million dollar company usually has less than 3 to 4% of the market in your local area. If you actually look at your whole service area.

And so buying out competition sometimes, usually unless you can get above, I would say like a 20 concentration rate, usually buying out people isn't usually effective. So an oligopoly where you have maybe five, six, seven big players, them merging together usually has a lot of benefit because now they have a lot more sway in the market because they might have 25, 30 of the market by buying someone out.

And so usually I see the downsides of all the extra clerical and admin work, etc. Overshadow the extra benefit of having increased market share in such a fragmented market.

Usually.

Mr. Anonymous, do you see a time when it will make sense for Augusta franchise to offer health insurance from the corporate level, something we can opt into that command center manages?

Not really. Because health insurance is state by state. It's also entity by entity. So it's very difficult to do a national thing without everyone being employees of one entity. So if, like we said, okay, everyone's gonna become employees of this one entity, then we could go for health insurance. But it's very, very difficult. I looked into this heavily like a year ago and ended up just getting through Allied Benefits and Allstate, like a preferred vendor relationship for each of us to sign up. Like you have to have three people in the group insurance kind of thing and we get some discounts and stuff. But I looked into trying to do it under one. It's like, it's very difficult, if not impossible, I would say, to do a whole bunch of different entities, different owners, different states underneath one policy. It's almost. It's very, very, very difficult. It was hard enough just for me to get my one entity that covers multiple states for them to all to be bent underneath one policy, let alone a whole bunch of different owners, etc and then the problem too is like one rogue owner putting weird employees underneath their policy could ruin it too. So like it increases everyone's premiums because that opens up risk to the the health insurance agency.

Why can't. There you go see Kyle Tarvin if is CC able to do mass text marketing to customers on a monthly basis like their one click emails. If we were to start doing this is there anything you would caution us on about it? Yeah. So CC isn't doing any mass text marketing. We won't until we can try to figure out down the road. We have it on the, on the roadmap for Copilot to try to figure out a way to to do mass marketing like we do with one click emails. One click estimate emails to try to figure out that for text. I know I won't put a ton of brain power in this for a while because I know the technology there is like built to prevent this when it comes to sms. But I think down the road we could do something with MMS that could potentially make this work.

But right now, no, CC is not doing anything in terms of like creating a calendar or schedule like we do for one click estimate emails. You could absolutely do it. My cautions would be don't overuse it because you want to make sure your transactional text if you're using that, which we do, I'll get get through. I would also say down the road we will have to have a meter at Copilot to charge for text. It cost us a lot of money. Like the Bellingham shop sent out a couple texts last month. It cost us more to send out all their text messages than their subscription for co pilot. So once a location gets a little bit larger it like it literally does cost us like 2 to 3 cents depending on where you're sending out text messages. Between 1 and 3 cents to send out text messages. So they have like 13,000 people. So you can imagine a couple text messages immediately like cost us a lot. So we're eventually gonna have to meter it. It's only, we're only like there's not a ton of accounts that are using it that much. So we've kind of let it slide. But we are spending thousands and thousands of dollars sent out text messages so we're eventually gonna have to meter it. We'll give everyone like a free few thousand probably per month and then after that if someone's mass messaging like you can look on other platforms like textedly or other things like that. It costs like it's a, it's not expensive, it's not cheap to send out text messages. So I would just put a note of caution that down the road expect if you're spending it sending out tens of thousands of text messages for marketing they there is going to be eventually a cost. So don't be shocked by that. We just have to all right Mr. Anonymous, I feel as though I had an underperforming GM. Okay, this is the type of question you want to put. Anonymous Very good, very good.

I feel as though I have an underperforming gm. We have been constantly discussing increasing discussing increasing close ratio, increasing the number of estimates being sent, increasing the number of mo's in the schedule and very little slow progress is being made. I've also been giving him tips and advice on how to help his location. He started as a GM one month ago starting in March. Location is starting to suffer due to KPI's not looking good and in and I'm in the mind to try and replace him by the end of April if things don't get turned around. I don't, I just don't want to lose my spring rush. I feel as though this may be an effort problem and not a knowledge problem. Is two months too soon to get rid of a new gm? Advice on what you should do in the situation? Give him until the end of May and get it together. Okay so regardless if someone's a GM or not, I would just say in general if they're underperforming. It is very rare that people turn things around like I want to be. I am a pretty optimistic person.

But data trumps my optimism when I see consistently that someone who at the onset of their employment doesn't do a great job. Typically they don't lead to like changing their behavior regardless of your prodding you're pushing etc the same way. Thing is true for employees that like they don't want to embedded themselves like listen to podcasts, watch listen to audiobooks and it's rare they're gonna change like so I I I've kind of given up on trying to change people. I will I would rather hire and 1 out of 20 people get hungry and they want to improve themselves and want to become better and I'll just keep feeding them, I'll give them more money, I'll give them more things to listen to on audiobooks, I'll give them more podcasts because I love to see them grow whether it be in the organization or moving on to other things. But unfortunately USI can't change someone's Desire to become better. You just can't. I would say it is okay, almost. I can't. I would say it is easier to find another person and hire 20 more other people and get the one than it is to take. Take the one person that you're trying to build the business around and motivate them to become better.

You just can't. Some people are not motivated. They don't really care. They're like, hey, I just want my paycheck. And that's fine. You need people like that too. But they're never going to become leaders. They're never going to become the people you can depend on. And that's fine too. You don't need everyone to be leaders. Now. In this case, you have a gm, they're underperforming. Do I think they're going to turn around? To be honest, no. Do I think you should fire them? Probably not. You might have put them in this position when they're not a leader. And.

In most of our locations and most businesses, the way to actually make more money and get ahead is to become a leader. And what that does sometimes is penalize the people that are just really hard workers. And so sometimes what we do in our good intentions is like, oh, we will make you a leader because you're doing a great job, therefore we will make you a leader. And so I can pay you more, etc. Because that's like the way to be able to pay them more is make them a leader, make them a trainer, make them a manager. When in reality they aren't good at leadership, they're just a good worker and that's fine. They don't want to improve themselves. They don't want to become a leader. They don't want to learn about leadership, they don't want to learn about management. They just want to work really hard. So.

What would I do in this situation?

I would make sure that I hire other people that I potentially replace this person with. I would try to find someone that's super hungry. Hunger when it comes to GM is most important. If they're a working gm, they just need to be hungry. Like, they literally just need to want to improve themselves and improve their skills and work like crazy hard. If they can do that, they're set up to be a GM because they don't have to create marketing material, they don't have to create a website, they don't have to answer the phone, they don't have to. They don't have to send out estimates if you're doing instant Quotes like they just need to work crazy hard and then want to lead and inspire the team. And usually that's going to be the person who's hungry. They're like listen to podcasts, they listen to audiobooks and you can't usually train that you're not going to inspire and change, change someone's ability to do that. Like whether it be the media team, copilot, command center, my Augusta locations, I just consistently see the people that are great in operations and management are the people like sucking up all material that is improving, improving themselves. And I'm willing to like forego perfection for quite some time if I just see progress towards them becoming better leaders. And just keep in mind a lot of us will take a really good high performing team member and think like, oh, I want to pay them more and the only way for me to pay them more and make them a leader and then you put them in a place of leadership and they quote unquote fail when in reality they just be a better worker like under P4P working hard by themselves without having to manage people.

And so the challenging part when you're smaller and I would say even like Augusta franchise is still small comparatively is a lot of times we don't have positions to elevate or.

Promote someone that doesn't have leadership skills because the only way for us to pay them more money is to make them a leader and trainer and manager. Whereas if you had a thousand employees, you could literally take a hard worker and build like you could elevate them within the company and pay them more without making them a leader. Like you can make them make a position for them that just allows them to work harder without having to become a leader. And so keep in mind, sometimes we elevate a really hard worker into being a GM or some sort of leadership manager and they fail in that role. And usually we have to fire them or they leave because they don't want to go back to being a team member. They would look at it as a demotion. So what I would be careful of is assuming a really hard worker can become a really good gm. That's that that is not always the case. And I think that the recipe that I'd be looking for is are they consuming information and becoming better themselves without your prodding? That's the GMs that I just see win all the time. Do they listen to these masterminds on their own time? That would be like a huge indicator of a great gm if they are listening to this as a team member because you guys can give access to this playlist, for example.

And they can watch it if they want. If they're doing that on their own time, Huge indicator of someone that I want to lead. If they are consuming audio books and podcasts and they're bringing stuff to you and sharing it to you, and they're doing all of this on their own time, there's a huge indicator of someone that's going to become a leader.

And if they're not doing those things, it doesn't mean necessarily mean they're bad. It just means that they're probably not a leader. Because a leader, like a great leader, is constantly trying to improve themselves. And if they're not, there's no chance the people underneath them are going to be improving themselves and becoming better and trying to get to the next place in their career or be challenged and like. So in my opinion, leadership comes down to, like, the ability to improve oneself. Because if you do that, you then will inspire all the people below you to follow you in that pursuit and that organization will do better. And so I personally would probably be looking for someone else in the organization that is hungry. And then I would talk to this person like, yo.

Either give them a warning or just pleasantly demote them. I mean, pleasantly demote them is like, hey, the leadership thing is not working out. You, I am happy to put you into a role of a team member. And P4P, I'm gonna bring a different leader in. Most people don't want to take that hit. One out of 10 will be like, thank goodness. I would just rather mow all day long. Like, I don't like this whole, like, having to work with people and KPIs. I just want to work hard. But most people will leave. It just is what it is. Because they'll look at as a demotion when in reality you're just trying to match their skill set to the best they possibly can. If my payroll in QuickBooks won't be set up for a few weeks due to not having a state id, should I withhold anything from employees checks for taxes?

I don't know.

You don't have a state ID yet, man, that takes weeks. Lord.

Sorry, I should not have said. Lord, that was. That was bad. I apologize. I don't like to say that bad, Michael. I apologize for doing that. Not having a state ID tax.

I would personally probably write the check knowing that you're trying to submit everything. It's just rare that you have to wait that long for state id. Also, your quarterlies, you can usually file backwards. The question is, do you. Do you not submit? So in QuickBooks you should be able to still file. That's weird. In payroll. Interesting. Okay. I thought you could potentially file your. Your, your payroll. Yeah, we got ours two days after tax. We did it through a company, though. Yeah.

You could ask command center, see what they would do in this situation. They do this all the time. But I know you can do quarterlies backwards and, and like retroactively you pay it. So it's like, dude, how do you withdraw yourself? Ask command center. That'd be my recommendation. I don't know if they're gonna. If they're able to do it without you being inside of the department or not, but you could submit to them and ask. I'd probably just do help@augustalongerservers.com they'll probably get that over to the payroll department. Personally, I would probably write the check. It's going to be one paycheck because it's going to be a few weeks. It's going to be one paycheck. I'd probably just write them the check and then do payroll down the road just to keep it simple. That's probably not the legally correct answer. I'd probably also just say I'd probably just eat the cost if you're worried about it and do retroactively backwards. Is that chat to be the thing that Nick came up with going to be integrated CCR max? Not right now, no. Every single location is so different. You have to create a new GPT for every location and integrating that into P4P, et cetera. Like that technology is moving so quickly. You have to keep changing it so frequently.

So. All right, everyone, have a fantastic rest of your day. Have a fantastic week. We are officially in April. I think about 70 of Augusta is currently now mowing. And over the next two to three weeks we'll get to 100%. So let's kick some butt. On Saturday, we had over 300 instant quote forms accepted. Let's go. And I think about 120, if I remember correctly. 120 applicants on Saturday. People applying to work at Augusta Lawn Care. So very good. Both of which is more than double. Well, I guess instant quotes were zero last year, but the application parts was double. And a 300 accepted was still more than double the number of just estimates.

Requested on that same day a year ago. Pretty good. So I love it. I know a lot of people are in their second spring rush and I've heard from a lot of you, it's starting to get overwhelming. This is normal.

And this is what happens in your second spring rush. I know a lot of people are hitting it right now, especially with instant quotes. It's tough because like they're accepted, they're expecting service. So be very cognizant of your three to four week trajectory of where how many jobs are being accepted. Because you may have to raise prices now, knowing that in four weeks if you don't, you'll be completely overwhelmed with work. So keep in mind where your capacities are and what your current trajectory. If you're getting two or three expenses accepted estimates per day on instant quotes, you really got to keep an eye on where that's going to lead in four weeks. That could potentially put you way over over your capacities. So keep that in mind. At least raise your prices on new customers if you think that's going to happen the next few weeks.

Otherwise you will literally like, oh, you'll wake up one day like I'm over capacity, raise prices and all of a sudden like every job accepted becomes overtime and like into the weekend. So please be very cognizant of that as we had in the spring rush, especially with instant quotes because you're allowing people to basically hijack your schedule and as like get on it immediately. And I'd rather you just raise prices a couple of weeks earlier and really elevate and make profit on those. Then all of a sudden be way over capacity, realize it have to turn leads off because you can't get the work done. To be very cognizant of that with instant coach is a risk that you have and that is you're allowing people to quote unquote, hijack your schedule and immediately accept. Therefore be very cognizant of where your budget hours are at over the next four or five weeks. All right everyone have a fantastic day. We'll see you tomorrow or at some point. I'm traveling so it's just weird scheduling. Love you all. Take care of.