Mike Minutes Mastermind 04/05/2023

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Let me copy this in and then we will get started.

Letting you go over a couple things. The Franchise Advisory Council had brought up a couple things, too.

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If you missed it, yesterday, I posted a video on the Facebook group asking for some videos for the media team so we can start highlighting some of your employees and just trying to highlight their stories and making shorts out of it, creating content, hopefully bringing more applicants in.

We might not use you if you're not good on camera. That's all I'm going to say. The media team will make that decision, so be energetic and I think it'll be helpful to get these, especially when we're kind of in this cycle of getting, you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of views on some of these shorts. I think it'll push a good press towards us actually getting applicants. So please watch that video if you would like to, and someone's willing to be able to be on camera, submit those videos to the to us@mediagustalonkerservices.com that would be great. Next thing.

Quick update. I guess this should technically be announcements. I'll switch to education in a second. Okay. I wanted to show, I put this on the P4P Facebook group. We are going to make a couple edits to this, but let me share my screen. There's a couple little bugs on it we found this morning, too, so bear with us the next day or two, we'll fix these. But now on your time cards, on P4P, from the manager perspective, you're going to see the person's base pay and labor percentage at the bottom of every time card. Just as a reminder, also your manual adjustment. Now you'll be able to indicate whether that goes to P4P or base pay or both. Okay, now, we were racking our brain this morning as to why you would ever want to do a manual adjustment over only to someone's base Pay and not P4P and base pay. So we will probably take that third option away. The reason we needed to do this is because sometimes Your manual adjustment, for example, like a yellow slip, should only go against their P4P, right? There's other times when you have a positive manual adjustment, for example, a $50 bonus on someone for a new referral, that you need to affect both their base Pay and their P4P in the case that they might hit base pay. And if they do and you did not add that manual adjustment also to their base pay. That $50 just disappeared. Right. So if you ever are willing to give a bonus or a manual adjustment that doesn't go away due to performance, like a $200 referral fee for another employee joining the team, whatever it is, you need to make sure that's also added to base pay so it's protected in the calculations we do. We've seen a couple bugs already this morning. We're going to fix them. But this is really important because.

You need to make sure there are certain bonuses that you want to protect. And you don't want them just added to P4P. You need them added to base pay as well. So.

That'S improved. 3D notifications got like 6 more done yesterday that are up. So again, please make sure you go to your 3D Notification Settings and turn those on. Make them automatic is my recommendation. Because now the employees on their phones have.

If they have the P4P app. Let me just show you.

They now have the 3D notifications thing on the left hand side here on the menu. They click on that and this is where the three notifications are going to come up. They're also going to get a push notification as soon as those are sent. I just recommend making them automatic.

But again, what I just mentioned here, there are a couple bugs we already know about on this. We'll fix them here in the next day or two in terms of report side of things. But yeah, it's good flexibility to be able to do it just a BVP or to do a base pay and P4P. So basically protecting that bonus in the event that they're hitting base pay. All right. Yeah. Make sure your 3D notification settings are on. I would recommend just turning them to automatic. Command center is not going to go through those for you. And if you're not going to do it, just put them on automatic, let them send out. We've made sure that those notifications are not going to be hurtful or harmful in any way. If you. If they are incorrect or you make a wrong mistake or do a test account or something like that, it's not going to be an issue. So.

All right. I had one more thing I wanted to go over. Franchise Advisory Council. Boom. Okay, two things.

Numero uno.

Initial service notification, if you watched last night's video is actually a really good demonstration of this. And.

It'S a much wide, broader scale because they have 3,600 clients, they just do treatments and fertilization. Last night's Video I put on the business boot camp one on the channel. Definitely watch that. You'll get my, my thoughts on why you don't like they, they were sending people two and three months before server started telling them what they they're going to start, what their package they're on and all the rest of it leading to massive attrition, massive cancellations and a massive amount of overhead of taking all those calls and, and customer service issues. I recommended that they do a couple days before notify them like an automated as every other service would be that they're going to be there. And if someone complains because they didn't get that email or they didn't opt out in time, you just refund them. The reason for that is because it's better than have they have a 70% attrition rate. 70% attrition rate. And I truly believe if they just started service with a two day notice. Yes, you would get people cancel. Yes. You'd probably have for them hundreds of people cancel in a day or two. Yes, yes. You might have to refund 10, 20, 30 people because they didn't get the email and are mad. Okay. You're still your attrition. I guarantee their attrition. If they do it right. We'll go from 70% to 45 to 50% easily just by doing that one thing. So I understand that they're going to some unhappy customers. I understand you're going to have to do do a couple refunds. But your attrition will be lower if you don't email someone three months in advance telling them about their service. There's snow still on the ground. They're not even thinking about lawn care. Waiting until the spring is here and maybe a week or two before max two. I'm more in the inclination of like next week we'll be at your property.

We risk that in our market because sometimes we'll get random snow that first week of March and that messes up this year. Right. Like this year for Bellingham Shop, for example, like really ruined us for March because we got snow randomly on that last week when we sent the email out. So people are like, oh no, don't come for another month. That usually doesn't happen. This is the bottom line.

When you send out an email.

And your first service is happening, you've got to remember that negativity will stick in your head 10 times more than positivity. What that means is you're gonna have five, 10 customers get mad about it. You're gonna get two or three, you have to refund and you're gonna all that in a matter of a couple days. And in your mind you're like, people are canceling, people are mad, people are unhappy. When in reality there's a few percentage of your customers, right? So I know what's gonna happen. Like if you watched last night's video, these guys, they're called yard dogs up in Calgary, they have 3,600 treatment only clients, right?

I know it's gonna happen. They're gonna do what I said and then what's going to happen is they're gonna get 400 or 500 calls within 24 hours and they're gonna be like, this is crazy. We're getting overloaded, we're getting completely bombarded. People are canceling, people are asking for refunds. And that's literally 12 to 15% of their customer base compared to 70% that canceled last year. And so the reason for that is because the proclivity for us is just human beings towards negativity. We're gonna grab onto that, we're gonna hold onto it much, much more than the other 90% of your customers that are happy, just fine with you showing up, thrilled with your service, happy to leave a positive review, and happy to pay their invoice. And so as you go into spring rush, you're going to be physically, mentally drained, okay? And potentially financially, because you're growing, you're expanding, you've put all this money out, you've just gone through the whole winter. Financially, you're stressed. So whenever there's negativity, your brain is, is immediately going to look for evidence that you are failing. Because you see it in your finances, you see it in your stress levels, you see it potentially in a relationship, you see it potentially, you know, employees, business overall, et cetera. But you have to remember from a mathematical standpoint, just from analyzing the business objectively, that 90, 95% of your customers are still happy with you. Okay? Check this out. People get hot. People get voted into the President United States with 40 and 50% of the population hating their guts, okay? There are companies like Apple that 30, 40% of the population hate their guts and they're very successful. You'll never make everyone happy. If you can make 90% of your customers happy, you have a very, very good business. If you can make anybody happy for any population of 90%, you're doing very well, then 10% are going to stick out in your brain like a sore thumb, okay? If you ever want to see what this kind of Looks like go through some of the YouTube comments that I have on my channel. Like one out of ten, literally, they, they would like to kill me. You would think they want to kill me or they think that I am like the worst thing since the devil. The other 90% though, enjoy it, love the content and hopefully get value from it. That's what you need to focus on. The 10 though, way louder in your head, okay? Negativity is always louder. It's always going to be magnified. Because our brains, that's why, that's why negativity sells on, on clickbait titles and news and all the rest of it. Because our brains like negativity, right? Because if we get a shot of adrenaline and we get cortisol being pumped through our bloodstream and like that's an addictive thing, right? So just keep that in mind. And this is why higher lows and lower highs is important, because you're forcing yourself to do is not be reactive to massive swings of positivity. And also more importantly, the low lows of like three customers canceling in one day, someone asking for a refund, an employee walking off the job. If you, if you're allowing yourself to gravitate towards the negativity instead of the math that you have 400 customers and you only lost five of them, that's like 1%. And oh, by the way, you got three jobs yesterday accepted, two more today accepted, and you're booked out for three weeks. Like, you have to stay objective, right? You will never make all your customers happy. And the reason that people go from three, four, five employees and retreat back being solo because like man, I never had had any sort of complaints. I never had any one complaint. You're right, because you were doing 30 or 40 lawns a week, now you're doing 300, now you're doing 200. The simple math of this is that you're going to have a complaint. And not only are you doing more in terms of mathematically, you also have other human beings that do not have equity in your company that are doing the work. You're not going to have a high as high quality standard of work. It's just how it is, right? So you got to ask yourself, do you want to deal with 5, 10% of people, potentially unhappy customers, refunds, employee issues, or do you want to stay small and do it forever by yourself? That's a decision you have to make. And if you decide to go the business route, you better be ready for the game of business that will slap you in the face when all things are going against you financially, personally, physically. And the 3, 4, 5, 10% of people that are complaining they're negative towards your business are going to have a negative impact on you mentally. But you have to step back and be objective about it. Right?

So yeah, if you ever want a little dish of negativity, just read the YouTube comments.

Oh man, oh man, you gotta love it. What you don't see is the band comments. The band comments are salacious. Salacious, was I gonna say?

Yeah. So like there's always me things that are. You're doing bad in your business as you're growing, expanding, there's always me bugs, there's gonna be problems, there's gonna be issues. And I have to even get better with this because like for example, I lose sleep over like copilot issues or P4P issues when I things are not working correctly. The bottom line is if we're growing, expanding, I know we're gonna have bugs, I know we're gonna have problems, I know we're gonna make mistakes. I know I'm gonna have to apologize for some things. That doesn't take away necessarily from the fact that it's hurtful, it's hard, and I lose sleep over it. It's simply the fact that I have to come to grips with. That's what I've signed up for. The same thing. Even like last year when, when we were, you know, 10% of calls at commands are like 40, 50 a day were being missed. We were not getting to everything. We had employees walking out. Cause we were asking for 50 plus hours and weekends and all the rest of it. And it was like it was bad, bad news. People were crying. It was just bad news.

And then I have every single day getting calls from franchisees that are very mad at me, which kills. Right? No sleeping, all of that. I have to step back and realize that I signed up for growth and secondarily that still 80, 90%, maybe not last spring, but a lot of people are still getting value from what we're doing and that I need to stay focused on that. Fix the problems. Yes. But Never allow the 5, 10, 15% of loud voices of unhappy customers to affect the fact of where I'm going. Like the direction. Right. So if you're trying to build a great business and you want to create jobs in your local community, that's an admirable thing. Right? Stay focused on that and not the 5 or 10% of customers that are literally screaming at you employee that walks off the job and Says you're whatever. Like you've got to stay focused on, on the goal. So that was my little pep talk for the day. Okay, questions?

All right, this is from nobody. Submit your question. Okay. In your opinion. Let me see here.

I recently started listening to Dave Ramsey and he seems to be pretty adamant that no one should be in debt. I'm wondering, from your point of view, do you think that business and personal debt should be treated or looked at differently? If so, how? Yeah, like this comes down to risk tolerance. It comes down to.

Can you sleep at night with debt?

Comes down to your. How your spouse reacts to that. Like, these are important things. Ultimately, you can grow faster using debt because you're able to have returns greater than the interest you're paying on the debt and therefore that's going to speed up growth. Right. I would also, anyone that says you should not have any debt, I would challenge them on the fact that every single massive company, even if they're extremely profitable, has debt. Look at how much debt Apple has. Look it up. Billions and billions of dollars, yet they have billions of dollars in cash. Why would they do that? They loaded up on debt in 20, 20 and 21. Massive, massive amount of bonds, which is debt for them. Why? Because they're paying 1, 2, 3% interest on those and we're in an interest rate environment where now it is 6, 7, 8% inflation, good move for them to have debt. That's why inflation ultimately makes the rich richer, is because they have debt with interest rates that are lower than the rate of inflation. And that's why inflation crushes the middle class. And the lower class is because they don't have debt, they deal with the rising cost of things without it paying down their debt at a faster rate.

So people with debt like inflation.

If they have fixed, assuming they have fixed debt on things like equipment, businesses, real estate, etc.

So how I think about it personally is just like, what's your tolerance of risk because you get more debt, even if it is a lower interest rate, it still weighs on you mentally and it's just higher risk. Right? Because you walk away from the business if it's paid off and nothing happens, you have debt and you walk away from a business or go bankrupt that follows you for seven years, you potentially can't get anywhere to rent.

Credit shot. You can't start another business. Yeah, it's bad news. Vince from Medicine Hat. In the spring rush, I often get a kind of work frenzy and have trouble slowing down enough to make good decisions and be present with My team. What resources would you recommend or advice would you give to someone? Slow down and focus more on leading others and less on getting my own task done. Yeah, I'm horrible at this, so I'm probably not the best person to ask for this. I would recommend trying to do something that is, like, intentionally telling yourself, like, physically that you need to switch modes.

There's a story, I forget who told it. Liz mentions it sometimes, and that is about the guy who was like, a cop. And then he. He'd go home and he'd put on, like this little, like a bracelet from his daughter and like, it was a physical reminder for him to, like, you know, he's not a cop anymore and law enforcement, like, he's a dad. This might, that might be helpful, like, something that you do to kind of, like, separate yourself.

There's a balance here because I don't think you should try to be something that you're not. But then obviously you try to improve. Right? Like, if I tried to be like, super Zen all day long.

I would. I would not being myself, and that would be very difficult in the long term. It's not sustainable. It's like, you can improve and try to be better. Like, I need to shut up sometimes and listen more. And like.

You know, I get so in tune with, like, what I'm working on that, like, I'm probably not as good as I should be with the team.

But, like, I. Number one, you're cognizant of it, Vince. So, like, that's the first step. Most people do that and it's only arrogant and stupid when they don't realize it. Right? So even if you watch the video last night of those guys in Canada, like, after I watched the episode, because I don't see all the stuff before, I just, I watch it like everyone else afterwards, I wanted to tell them, like, hey, you're losing good people probably because they think you're a little bit strange and weird and you're like, super cringe on some stuff.

So, yeah, I think we can all improve at this. I think ultimately though, you're going to find balance. Don't put on a facade that you're not, but then just try to improve actually who you are. So, like, my big thing I've worked on for the last year or two is, like, when I'm listening to someone, I'm listening and I'm not thinking about what I'm going to say next. That was really hard. And I'm still not very good at it, honestly. And when I get really stressed out. I usually. That goes out the window, to be perfectly honest. So, yeah, I'm probably not the best person to ask this question. I think the biggest step that you have already done is you are aware of it and you're trying to improve it. And so whether it be like even having something like this that you hold and you just know when you have this, this is. You're. You're talking to the team now and like you need to relax and chill out.

You know, it's sometimes helpful. Connor from Evansville, question about PvP. So we ended up firing this guy. He had had no drive and we could tell. We found out, found him back at the truck sitting multiple times during the day. My crew asked if we were going to give him fever P Since they did 99, 90% of the work and he was just aimless and pretty much absent for the job. Should I pay him hourly on that day? Give him.

Give him PvP or give the PvP to the crew who did the work since he was fired and won't know the difference. I have at this time told them no to the P4P. But I want. Don't want to set a bad precedent with the crew either. I thought if P4P were $200 and I paid him based on and hourly, say 140, that I could divide out the remaining 60 to the other two in the job. So personally, I would not make a. You're. I would not die on this hill. If your crew like this is the. The best thing about P4P is that they actually told you if you weren't on P4P, there's a good chance this guy would have lasted another week.

So in my opinion, I would give the guys the P for P.

We're talking about an extra. What if there's a crew of two other people in the job?

100 bucks paid in base. I want to give us the remaining 60. Yeah. Yeah. Give the remaining 60. Yeah. You're talking about $30. Yeah, do it. I would actually make a big deal of it at a team meeting, say, hey guys, I decided that we're going to assign all the. That P4P to you guys. I appreciate you guys being honest and holding the standard of the team high and keeping everyone accountable. And the biggest thing about this is why I'd be saying to them, the biggest thing about P4P is it's going to smoke out the low performers. And so I appreciate you all letting me know as soon as possible. And I promise you that when you Tell me that I'll get rid of people right away. Your highest performers will love you for that. Because the worst thing they, the thing they hate the most is having to work with people who are not pulling their weight all day long.

Terrell from Boone's Creek. All right, I'm over time.

We had a very strong wind come through and knock quite a few branches down on most of our yards. Very few people let us know about the extra branches we still get. We still, we are still fairly small and trying to get in. Clients, obviously, do you kind of let things like that fly or charge? For most guards, it's not too terribly bad. But for some it's quite a bit extra. 10 to 15 minutes. I would probably do a one click estimate email. I would send one to your entire database to try to just get, you know, cleanups. I would send another one to your mowing customers that would specifically say we're going to go ahead and eat the cost if there's just a few branches in your lawn. If it takes us more than 10 minutes, we're going to charge you X amount or if there is significant debris, or just charge a flat amount, for example, like this week only for everyone. It's going to be an extra $10, for example, however you wanted to do that. But that's how I would, I would play with this.

That'd just be my recommendation. I'm trying to think a flat fee is gonna make some people mad. So you don't want to do that. You don't want to say 10 minutes because then they're figuring out a dollar amount.

I would probably say that if there is significant amounts of debris in your property, there's gonna be up charge of up to. And then don't give a dollar. Let's call it $15. Just play it. Save at 15 bucks. Yes. There's gonna be a couple that are way longer and you're like, oh man, I would do something like that. There, there may be an extra additional charge this first service only of up to $20 to pick up, remove and haul that dump, that debris to the dump. That's a good deal. I think most customers would be happy with that and be happy that you just took care of it because what they're really doing is crossing their fingers and hope you just take care of it anyways. But if you just tell them up front like this is going to happen, you don't need to click on anything. We're just going to do service and there might be an upcharge if there's additional branches and debris on your property. The vast majority of them would be thrilled for $15 or $20 that because they don't have a truck or a trailer to haul it to the dump. Max from Burnaby Question regarding security. Seems Augusta defaults to using a similar password on most platforms for users to log into email servers, autopilot, pvp etc. Is there a concern that system is vulnerable because of this? Are there plans to increase security in the future? Is there is currently a system in place to mitigate security issues? It seems like disgruntled employee could cause a lot of damage.

First and foremost it's service AutoPilot's the main one because everything else requires two factor authentication, so I'm not too concerned with that. P4P for example doesn't affect their payroll because that's in QuickBooks or Gusto, so I'm not too concerned about that one. Service Auto part doesn't have two FA, but the reason we have to have the similar passwords is because otherwise you have a gazillion amount of password requests coming from Command center every day. Like we two three years ago, this is off the charts so we have to do it somewhat similar and keep track of them, etc. We change passwords at Command center every so often, so if there are team members that are gone, we get them out immediately. Not only do you lock them out of our system as soon as they're fired, we make sure that we change all the passwords every so often. So I'm not, I'm not too concerned about this. I'm not going to spend an inordinate amount of time knowing also too that every one of us have general liability insurance that covers this type of thing.

And we haven't had any issues yet. We change passwords at Command center quite frequently. Every time someone's fired, they get shut out immediately and it's like pretty hardcore that you can't see anything.

On your all's end.

You can change your server pie account on your end. It doesn't affect us now when we have better integrations with Copilot, a lot of that will be improved too because you can change passwords as much as you want without affecting command center. Like your Google passwords etc. The Google one's the most pain in the butt. So we we've had to figure out past year like make it to where we're not asking you guys every single day for a 2fa two factor authentication. Last question. Landon, Tallahassee, Florida I have a client who told command center they don't like talking to the office and want to call with me. How do you handle these situations? Thanks. I would I reach out to them obviously probably they know you're the owner, they like you. Probably. I'm assuming they are existing client from the past and they just want to talk to you. I would have an honest conversation with them. If you really want to keep this client, let's assume that you want to keep them. I would have an honest conversation with them telling them why you have an office, your plans to be able to add jobs, grow the business and focus on creating a business for your family and I you working out in the field for the next 20 years, talking to them every single time and all your other customers is not sustainable and that you would love to service their property and that.

You'Re confident that 99.9% of the issues they have can be dealt with from the office and if they're not, that the command center is going to create a ticket for you and you will address it yourself. That be assuming that you want this client. Right. Realize that as you scale and grow from solo operator, whether you're answering every phone call and every email and you start scaling this, you will lose 1 2% of customers simply because of this. And you need to accept that if if your goal is to grow a big bigger business. Just part of the game happened to me at every single stage from when I stopped taking the emails to when I stopped taking phone calls, et cetera. Like every single stage like, oh, I wanna talk to Mike. And then when Liz moved outta the office like oh, I wanna talk to Liz. And I was like, no, you're like so you're stuck with Marcus. Sorry. And Marcus leaves like I like Marcus. He was cute. It's like, no, you're stuck with Lee or no, no, now it'd be Dustin or Dylan. She's also cute too.

Our own government is in debt. Yeah, I would, I wouldn't use them as a benchmark though. They're we're our GDPs now below our our debt ratio. All right guys, have fantastic rest your Wednesday and we'll see you tomorrow. Take care.