Mike Minutes Mastermind 04/04/2024 (New Owner Success Manager!)

And we're live back in the office. Hope everyone's doing good. Let's get this party started. Check one, two.

All right, I have a few announcements.

First off, sorry about this morning. Copilot went down for an hour. We are doing a debrief with Noricon with AWS to see exactly what happened. We believe it's an issue with this little tiny thing called Max Children. Don't worry about it. We don't know why exactly didn't swap over to a different database because we have redundancy. So we will make sure it doesn't happen in the future. But we didn't do anything. That was what was crazy about this one. We didn't deploy anything or make any changes. And then something broke. It was just like. It just stopped. So we're meeting with them and saying why didn't it switch over to the other servers? So I apologize for that tremendously. It was down for just over an hour, and I know it's absolute chaos. So to each and every one of you, I'm very sorry. Don't know why I didn't switch over. The other ones we're having. We're meeting with AWS to see why not and then make sure there's things in place to prevent that ever from happening.

All right. I have other announcements, though. Before I do that, I need to put this into Facebook.

Sorry, a bit of a cough. So I'm going to try to speak from my stomach instead of my throat as much. Give me one second.

Okay. That's in Facebook. Very good. Cool. All right, two more announcements. Next one. If you are in the texting department, you will see that Command center is going to be putting their name at the end of each text message as a way to be able to keep track of who is is doing that. And so we've had some issues when owners get in there and they respond totally fine. But we don't. We don't know who. Who is doing that. And we think it potentially is someone here at Command Center. And so to keep track of that better, they're going to be putting their name like they would like end of any other ticket or anything that their call notes, et cetera. They're going to put their name at the end of that office staff and then putting their name there. So that is for text messages from Copilot. Okay, so the bigger announcement, the one that I kind of referenced to in the title, is we are hiring a osm, which stands for Owner Success Manager. And this individual will be responsible for several things the reason it's important that we have this position is once Chuck was released from Augusta.

There was a lot of things that fell really on Liz and Lee the most, a little bit on myself, but mostly on them. And they've been champs and ticket for the team and really taken a lot on the past few months and making sure that each of their departments, there was not negative impact from that move, but there's just way too much on their plate. And so as a way to make sure that they have time to be able to actually do their roles effectively, we need to get someone to kind of come in and replace, really, Chuck in terms of what he was doing and allow Lee to focus on the things that he's focused on and Liz at command center. So.

Also, another lack that we've seen is everyone's out of Augusta is so awesome and nice, and I appreciate that a lot. It's partly why. It's partly how Lee screens people out. Coming into Augusta is like, are you a nice person to be around? Because we're going to spend a lot of time with you, you're going to spend a lot of time with other people that we love inside Augusta Nation, and we don't want jerk balls. So.

However, what that causes sometimes is no one wants to speak up or say something like, hey, I have an idea, or I think this might be wrong, or what. And so we've done, like, the yellow thing for command center feedback, et cetera, but we've never really had it where we actively are proactively reaching out to people we know are struggling, because usually someone who doesn't put coaching calls, usually within six months, there's some sort of cataclysmic event. And they're so far the systems, we can't help them, and we can't do state of emergency, etc. And so to prevent that from happening and prevent someone from just getting in a bad mental space, and all of a sudden, six months, they have to close because they just went way off track. That could have been prevented in month one or two if we would have been proactively reaching out. The coaches, they have ways of, like, elevating, escalating things up to Lee and. And the leadership team if there are people starting to go off track. But we've never really had a position that actively reaches out and, like, gets in the trenches with that individual to prevent the. The crash down the road. And usually a crash comes in the form of having to declare a state of emergency, closing the location, not having money in the bank. Like we should never get to that stage. We should have seen it beforehand and act actively gone against it. The problem is everyone's so nice. It's like I don't want to be go against, I don't want to raise a fuss, I don't want to appear as if I am against and I appreciate that. But it's not super conducive to success of your location. And so we're going to be working on the owner success manager. Their primary role will be first and foremost to take the regional manager role that Chuck used to have. He'll be taking that on in terms of my locations so that my locations are extracting the overall franchise in all of Augusta Nation and then secondly ensuring that each owner, we would be sending out surveys and we'd be actively collecting data from all of you in terms of like where we can improve, how we can help you more. We are definitely limited by budget simply due to the fact that we don't have royalties and I'm very aware of that.

The average franchise of our size would be making about four and a half times as much revenue because they have royalties. We are limited in that card. I would love to have like already like 10 OSMs. I would love to have that where like we are so hands up. We just can't afford it. We just can't. At 1200amonth, there's just so much we can do. However, we do think we can step this up massively. This is something that the franchise advisory council brought up a few weeks back and I took pretty much immediate action within 24 hours. And so this individual, over the course of the summer, as they get onboarded and ramped up, will start be sending out surveys, collecting information and then based upon that, actively reaching out to owners that the coaches feel are struggling, need a little more hands on attention and that right now someone like Lee, Liz, myself are not going to have time to like jump in one on one with someone and help them out, give them a call and just like pick them up off the ground when they're really low. And I see consistently signs of that going to happen. And I can just be like, okay, if they don't make a quick turn right now, in three months we're going to be having a call of I have no money and I either have to close or like something has to change. And like that's a lot harder to fix than if they would have called six months ago and we would have actively jumped in. So that's primary. The role of the owner Success manager is the regional manager. To take that off of Lee's plate that he's been managing the last several months. And then also ensure that overall we are much more proactive on coaching, etc. They'll be part of the coaching program, making sure they're available to do coaching calls. And so that way Lee can really focus on other elements that he's just been stretched thin in like 5, 6 different areas of the business. So all of the leadership teams decided to have this individual on board and they will be joining the leadership team, which includes myself, Lee and Liz right now. And so this individual.

I guess it sounds like I'm trying to build it up. Okay, I'll just tell you the name and then I'll tell you why. Kind of like a little bit of background. Most of you know this individual. They are local to the area and their name is Nick Reed. So Nick Reed's gonna be joining the leadership team. He's had a location now for four years. Every single year, including his first year, he's been profitable. He's maintained at the smaller size and one of his employees that's been with him for about three and a half years is. Or three, three and a half, something like that is going to be. His general manager has already taken that responsibility on and is running his location. And so Nick is going to be half the time working about an hour and a half from here and then half the time up here at command center at Bellingham. Shop in the trenches with them, but actively managing the success of all locations and being much more proactive in terms of our reach out and helping the owners. So I'm excited for that. It's going to be a couple more weeks until he is started and it'll be a couple more months until he's fully onboarded. There'll be a lot of training, coaching and things that we will be pouring into him. The reason that we chose Nick is many various facets. First and foremost, the overall goal of what we're trying to do. The fact that Nick started at the Bellingham shop in about six, seven years ago. He was like 18, 19 years old and started from there, became high performer there, works there for about two, two and a half, three years and then moved to Berriesville, started his location. He was the first member of the 3F program, franchise fee forgiveness. And like I said, every year he has been profitable. He's a member of the franchise advisory council and so really great member to the team too because there's no sort of ramp up in terms of trust that we have to build with him. Lee, Liz and myself have worked directly with Nick in the field. Personally, I've worked with him in the field. Lee has worked with them in the field. Liz was his direct manager. So we have a lot of built up trust and so we could hit the ground running on a lot of initiatives that I want to, I want to make a lot of progress on for better support, especially going into winter. But just a lot of different things we need to get done. We don't have time to get someone that's new or fresh or a suit and tie type individual in here. Nick is great because if and when the time arises, he is very happy to jump in and do hard work. This is not someone that's polished and can't get their fingernails dirty and is willing to help jump in with the team and get work done and will do laps around many frontline team members. He's extremely inspiring to many of our frontline team members because of what he's gone through, what he sacrificed to become a part of Augusta Nation in terms of living in his van for a couple years and rising up through the ranks. It's really, really what we embody. And so I look forward to him being able to little bit more involved to be more of a voice to all of your frontline team members and really a beacon for the 3F program as well as most importantly, just inspiring your team to do more in life. And so there'll be a lot of stuff that he can contribute on that end and he will be part of the coaching program and Lee will be helping him transition to where Nick is really ahead of the, of the coaching program over the next several months. Lee will always be part of the coaching program, though on the monthly, they do monthly calls with the coaches only, he'll be still part of that. So that's kind of the big announcement for today. So if you don't know who Nick Reed is, you can look on the directories from Marysville, Washington and really looking forward to having him join the team. So again, it's not this coming week, but the week after. He'll start coming on board and we'll give more of his contacts and once he's set up and everything, give more access that he can be available and hit the ground running. So I appreciate everyone's support and I think it's gonna be just an all around win for us to be able to reach out to owners much more proactively and help them before things become cataclysmic. Bad events. So that is the big announcement for today.

Make sure I put this into the email one cut that, put it here.

All right, we got some questions. No paste. There it is.

All right, present Share screen.

All right, Numero uno.

Russell Thompson from Canton, Georgia on my Google Local Services leads I've been keeping track of the time it takes from their phone calls with Max to keep to me getting a notification. My concern is that I'm not getting the estimate set up until the next day. On most occasions on the call Max says someone will call you back right away. Is there a lag because of spring rush or is it or is this not normal? I'm still very happy to use Max but obviously speed of getting a quote back to is very important. The latest example is a call on Tuesday 11 and is now 9 o' clock Wednesday and I have no notification other than the fact it was a Google Local services lead. But you aren't going to get a notification when they send an estimate out. Like if command center sends out the estimate they're not, you're not going to get a notification. I did see that the lead was added to my database and that an attempt to call back was made but no estimate was ever sent.

If I did not know about this lead because of two local services, this client would likely never be contacted again unless he calls us back. How can we make sure leads like this don't fall through the cracks? Make sure that an estimate is sent even if you're unable to confirm information the callback. This would at least let us see an estimate was sent and our follow ups automations consider so for example if there's incomplete data on a, on a call to Max we can't set up the estimate for you. We can't like just even send them one like for example the address is incorrect, they don't give us the entire address, they don't confirm certain things. Potentially it's, it's possible that that's what it is. So on an event like this I would just submit a yellow slip and then they would dig into it and give you the exacts on this but it's not normal that you're waiting you know 22 hours for an estimate to be sent out. I know that that's not happening and every day they're getting to inbox zero so which means they're clear, they're clearing all of these out and they're jumping on them so this should not be a problem and just submit one to yellow just see what happened. But it is likely that in the event of calling them, they found out like something was wrong, I'm gonna guess, but I don't know. Just somebody else. They'll do the whole. They'll go right into it. They'll screenshot stuff. They'll send you the whole nine yards.

Javier Garcia from Stone Mountain, Georgia. Wow, Georgia's alive and well today. Hey, Mike. I'm currently having trouble increasing my close ratio. One very common objection I get is clients being hesitant to add a card on file. Do you have any advice on handling this? I. I suspect some clients hesitate because they haven't had the chance to see us or our trucks in person yet. This is especially true for smaller locations. I'm considering a solution where we schedule and complete their initial mowing without requiring card details upfront. They can pay after the service, and if they're satisfied, we can then ask to get a card on file for future services. What do you think about this approach? Any other suggestions? Thanks. Yeah, so like, you can absolutely do this. You will have a higher close ratio. You will reduce your close ratio slightly by adding this friction in there. I would say if you don't add on the front end, you're adding it on the back end. That has more admin time. It's also the fact that not, not everyone afterwards is also going to put their card on file. So you're either going to take the hit after or before by requiring a card on file. If you're like in growth mode and you have no leads on the schedule and you're just getting started, it might not be a bad, hey, I'm not going to require cards on file. I'm just going to have an automation that cleans up after me, which basically sends out to people who don't have a card on file and ask them for a credit card. Ask. There's the video tutorial on how to set that up inside of the academy if you don't want a card on file.

So it really just comes down to like, are you dying for work? If you're dying for work, yes. Remove every single bottleneck, hit capacity, and then like, okay, I need more bottlenecks, because I don't. I already have so much work. So it's not just like.

I would say, when you're.

Adding, when you hit capacity, that's also when you start adding in things like credit cards on file, increasing your deposit threshold. And any other thing that's going to potentially weed out customers or qualify them is when you hit capacity. Because at that point you don't really care if they don't accept. It's like, look, I don't have time to do your job. I'm going to require a credit card on file for everyone knowing I might take my close ratio from 54% to 49% but now I know my cash flow is going to be much better. So it just, it's just like I'd always just say hit, hit your deposit threshold or hit your.

Capacity. And then at that point you're either raising prices and or because raising prices decreases your close ratio, requiring a credit card on file before you even do service is going to recruit your close ratio. It's just a trade off.

Eric Lardo from Florida I have had to issue a couple of refunds recently. I processed the refunds through Stripe but wanted to know what is the best and correct practice to record this on a paid invoice in Copilot. To keep accurate records accurate? Yeah, great question. There is a.

I know it's in Copilot University. If not, it probably is also inside the academy on the dashboard and that is how to do refunds. And you can do partial refunds. You can do full refunds. Like 3 months ago you could only do full refunds of payments, but now you can do partial refunds inside of Copilot. So.

Hutch, I think paying to have ads ran is inflating our cac.

Yes, it will, because you have an aggregate of.

You have an aggregate of people who are basically coming for free. They see your trucks, they get referred to you, etc. So you always are going to have those. If you pay any money towards ads, you're going to increase your cac because now you went from zero CAC to whatever you're spending. And so somewhere in between there is where your blended customer acquisition cost is going to come from. But let's keep going here. The screenshot below is, is from the only campaign I ran in south park from mid February to the end of March. The other screenshot is one of our reports from. From. I'm guessing you mean Evergrow, which does not include the 500 management fee, essentially doubling our cost per lead, I think. Thoughts? Okay, let's take a look.

Okay, so this is Evergrow. So I'm guessing this is afterwards you got five conversions. Your customer acquisition. Your customer customer acquisition cost is 117. Cost per click is $10. Ooh, that seems a little high. But it just depends on what your keywords are. So I'm like super concerned. You got generic is higher.

Brand oh, it's so low. It's low Impressions conversion rate is 8.3%. That's pretty good. Okay, now you want me to look at the other one? All right, next. Is it this one?

Okay, let's take a look. Hey, so this is I think the one you said you did by yourself.

Okay, now I'm confused. Where's the. Okay, the clicks. Got it. Okay. Average cost per click is three bucks. Again, cost per click doesn't mean a real customer. So that's fine. So you don't have your track Google tracking. So you don't have any conversions. Click through rate is a little bit lower but still 5% is not horrible.

Your cost is 325. You got one of those clicks. Okay, which.

Let'S see here. Sorry, I'm just failing to see one bit of information.

I think.

Yeah, like that's pretty, pretty high. Like, but Evergrow is pretty honest about the fact like hey, if you're, if you're looking at, you're going to usually spend 100 to 120 per lead. That's kind of what they say is like their average during spring rush you're probably going to go lower outside that you're going to go higher. And they're pretty honest about that. So I think they're pretty upfront. They're very clear in terms of like showing that the Metrics is the 500 management fee worth? It really just depends on what your goals are and what you're trying to get done. And if you're only spending like 2 or $300 on ads might not be the best idea because you literally are going to have to beat out their ads by like.

2X to make it worth it. So.

Yeah, like across the board.

Across the board at Lawn Care, Road Design, Augusta Etc, we are seeing a much higher cost per click. And it's not a matter of there being more clicks compared to usual or less click or it's not a matter of having higher ad rates. It's a matter of having less click, less people searching for the keywords.

Just overall and you can see in Google trends and stuff like that, it's, it looks very similar if you look at the macro trend like all the United states. But even a 5 or 10% decrease in search volume will impact our cost per click significantly. So like in the past if I was at $8 cost per click I'm like okay, you gotta do something different. Like if that's 8, 10, 15, that's pretty high.

But is what kind of like that's kind of what's happening right now. There's less people looking for lawn care. Is it because there's less money? Because there's less people who are more tight? Likely. Yes. I talked about with Lee today and you guys will hear on the podcast if not tomorrow on Saturday probably. But like the whole goal of like getting the thousand location. Yes. We want to change the level of professional in the industry. Most of you probably don't care about that. You want a really profitable business and I am aware of that. I know that by having the thousand locations we will have brand awareness that will bring your cast recording cost down by half. The same way that we've seen a ton like almost 10x increase in the amount of people applying on Augusta lawn care for careers as we've grown. I believe the same thing will happen for leads as we begin to scale because you get brand awareness at the customer level. Not just the employee level but the customer level.

So.

Yeah I would recommend just because we recorded today is fresh my head listen to the Lee's next C suite unfiltered. I think it's a really good episode. I talk specifically about some of the stuff we're working on. One of which is like the amount of all the money we're spending on ads for doing this pretty cool thing with tracking the ads. You can look it up if you're interested in like hieros. There's a couple other softwares conversionally that we're using to really like hone this thing in.

And I'm going to be starting to test next week at the Bellingham shop as well as I want to go to cold markets. So I'm going to use like the franchise for example and go to cold people who are not in lawn care and some several other things. But I want to hone that in like crazy really good. And then I would like don't hold me to this. I would like it to be eventually where we can offer like a. A lead thing for everyone and where it's like hey during just spring rush we. You can basically buy leads.

As they come in but we. We gotta figure it out. Don't hold me to that. I'm just trying to see if we can get that it needs to be half compared to what everyone's spending right now on Google for me to like think about it. And I'm just seeing if we can if. If we really hone it in if I really get several things dialed. So we're trying like 40 fif. Probably 50, 55 different ad sets and it's gonna keep going up over the next couple weeks as we add in Bellingham, et cetera. And I just want to like really hone this in for next spring. So we'll see. Kyle Tarvin on. On the one on the all in one instant quote door hangers. Why is the mowing line item the only one you can add pre written prices on? It'd be nice to have the option to be able to write prices on the mulch and property clamp as well. Okay.

Okay, Kyle, I'm gonna do this for you. I was just gonna say send it to Media. It's likely Pro Shop or Vistaprint. Just messed it up.

Media? No. Is it Media? Yeah, Media. Augusta. Sorry guys, I'm a little tired.

From the Mastermind.

Question. Sorry guys, one second. Just didn't want to have to push you off. Kyle, one second.

Down. Okay. It'll be probably a couple weeks. Vistaprint's just kind of slow on these things. They put on all the mowing. They likely just like just did the mowing instead of like all instant quotes. So, Forrest Modesto, how is GM monthly bonus calculated and how is it paid out? We want to make sure we are doing this correctly this year. Thank you in advance.

So there are two videos. If you go to the academy, there are two videos. One on GM compensation. One is for the starter role and the other is for a regular general manager that's going into an existing location. So we just do it based upon if they're above 20,000, 40,000, $60,000 and $80,000 per month in revenue. They get bonuses based upon revenue. And then their real big meaty thing is the.

Is the profit sharing. So and like that should be where the meat is at. And a good gm, like if they stay for a few years, they can make good money. Like I don't think Lee would mind. Maybe not. Lee made really good money. I'll just say that when he was GM he had like really profitable, you know, he made well above six figures running the location when it's really profitable. And so like does that mean that they're gonna get in their first year? No, that's why we do the revenue based ones.

But the.

Like the revenue of bonuses. But really you want the nut, you want like the thing they're really going after is be profit. And I would highly recommend that. And it means patience on their part. But I do want to give them some incentive for that first year because otherwise very demoralizing. If it's a new location or if you're like, you were in growth mode, and you're switching over to profit mode, and there's just no profit being made. That can be super demoralizing for a gm, and I need their head in the game. Like, incentivize them, whatever you got to do. If they're a gm, you want them firing in all cylinders. So I'm a big believer in outsized bonuses.

And that is like, incentive, everything based upon what you want to see in the business. That way, when you're gone, you just know everyone's pushing for the same thing, Right? So.

Whether it be, like, Copilot or Augusta or like, whatever I want to see happen in the business, when it comes to a manager, I'm going to heavily incentivize them based on the thing that I am most concerned about when I am gone, because then I know they can take care of it. And so I just recommend profitability being the thing that you drive the GM towards and where they can make a good chunk of dough if they stick around. If someone's floating, like, every. You know, if they're only in a GMO for, like, a year or two, they usually don't make a ton of money. Year, not so much. It's when they get in, like, that second, that third year, they start crushing it. And you. I'd recommend just, like, lay out the pay scale for them, and then. Then you got to ask, is someone that's willing to sacrifice for three years before they really get a really good paycheck, would they just go start their own business? So you got to be careful of that, and that's why we have the revenue incentives for GMs as well, in addition to the profit sharing.

All right, that's all I got.

Thank you all, and have a fantastic Thursday. Congratulations to Nick Reed. Send him a congratulatory note. He's gonna be kicking butt. I know he's rearing to go and really, really looking forward to helping everybody and takes it as a really great responsibility. I appreciate him for that. And so you'll be seeing more of him and more of us as a leadership team, including him on things. So thank you, Nick, for your service to Augusta Nation. It's gonna be a killer time, and I look forward to it. Thank you all. Take care.