Mike Minutes Mastermind 04/06/2023

Hey, everyone. Hope you're doing super well. We're gonna jump right into questions. If you want to see a very salty version of myself, feel free to stick around to the end of this video. And I had a couple updates as well, so. Actually, you know what? Let me do the updates now. I'll do the corrective action at the end. One second. Let me put this into YouTube.

Okay, let's see your copy. Facebook.

All right. Boom.

All right, let me do a couple announcements, questions, and then let's just call it education. All right, let's see here.

All right, two quick announcements.

There it is. As I've stated before, we are redesigning the website. Probably August is what we're shooting for, for redesigning everything. We are going to be testing it at my new location because we can easily test at existing locations, but I want to test the new design when I start my location in June. And we want to test and basically beta test against our current design in terms of uptake. One thing I was talking about with the team this morning was.

We have to keep in mind that what looks good to us on a website is not necessarily what looks good to a customer, because our customer demographic is twice my age or three times my age. So what looks good, flashy, cool, awesome to us is not necessarily what's going to convert better. It might convert better for you, but you're not the target market. This is the biggest disconnect with home service industries is that we as contractors are not the target market. And so we filter everything through our marketing and branding mind that is 20 to 40 years younger than our target demographic. Big mistake. So instead of me thinking that the site looks awesome, I want to beta test it, and I'll do that in June, make any tweaks that we see, and then July, August, hopefully by end of August, we'll be able to get everyone's sites changed over to the new design. In doing so, we'll probably create, revamp the whole support system. We've seen what works and what doesn't over the past couple of, I guess, year. And so we'll probably revamp the whole thing so that way you can add service pages and take away service pages, which right now is a ton of work for us to do. And people are switching back and forth, which we want you to have the ability to do. But it's a ton of work. And so.

We want to make it where it's a little bit easier. So we have to kind of standardize, do several things on the back end, build that infrastructure over this year and hopefully allow it to be a little bit faster for you to be able to do that. You don't have to wait for weeks because right now it's extremely custom when we do the each one of these. Anyways, I'll get to that part later. All right, let's jump into questions.

Kyle Tarvin. I asked a question the other day about dropping equipment coverage on insurance. Since we had our stuff stolen. I asked my agent if we can remove anything else and she sent me this is the monthly premiums for the insurance coverage. This does not include general liability or truck insurance. I also asked if we could increase our deductible on the inland marine and she said no, since it was an additional coverage. It doesn't qualify to be raised. Anything I could drop. Yeah. So keep in mind when you say general liability, there's like a whole bunch of insurances inside of and coverages inside of that policy. So inland you got terrorist, you got information security, like a cybersecurity. There's a whole bunch of stuff inside of that. So keep that in mind. It's not like every single one of those. You can adjust or change.

Yeah. So this is very low. I would try to move that up for sure. Yeah. Like if you move this to a thousand or two thousand or as high as you can go, I'd recommend that.

Yeah. Oh, I see. 100. So you're paying $119.

In the marine deductible. Yes, I would personally. This is just me personally. I'd be moving my deductibles up. I think it'd save you 50 to 100 bucks a month if you just move these up, these deductibles.

I don't know what your coverages are on data compromise. But like, I just personally do not think this is. I've just seen too many insurances. Insurances, when they get pinned on this, they put it back on the vendors. Right. So like, oh, stripe. Got what we're going to put back on stripe. And then stripe has to do their thing. Like, I'm not saying you should not have it because it's in most of almost all of your general liability.

But I would take a look at what those coverages are and see if it's actually necessary to have. Those would be like if you're trying to cut costs. Those were the things I'd be doing.

Max from Harwood Burnaby.

Website edit request. I didn't see a place to submit this on the form, so I'm typing this here. The image Reel in the main has a bunch of pictures with the American patches in the screw. Can we use different images please or remove the ones with flag somewhere else?

Yeah, just literally copy and paste this max and send it to web@augusta longerservices.com when we redid some stuff spring we probably accidentally redid your pictures but we have those and we can put them in there. Just email web@augustalongerservices.com.

Connor from Evansville I'm I'm sure I know the answer. However, we have one customer on the side of town that we service on Mondays but because of his complaint last year we have put him in the end of our week on the way back to the shop. This is growing increasingly hard to follow through with lately. Do I send him a modifying mowing welcome letter saying him that we are changing his mode to Monday instead of Thursday or Friday on our way back to the shop at the end of the week? It sounds like if if he's reasonable I would say, look, this created a bunch of issues from a scheduling perspective. You can continue to have us on Thursday or Friday. Here's the new price for that. Otherwise we can mail you on Monday and then let him make the decision. We had one customer do this and they were paying us approximately eight times as much as they would, typically because they wanted a specific person to come to their house.

This is nobody I wanted to get into gossip or slander, but I was curious if you could go into more detail about that person, Dick S. Who was kicked out of Augusta. What was the bad behavior? Really? I'm only asking because I would like to avoid people like this when I suggest that they should look into joining Augusta. I had someone reach out to me on Facebook and ask what I think of Augusta. He said he's not sure he'd be allowed to join because he's a convicted felon. Normally I would just hold. Normally I wouldn't hold that against him, but I would like as many examples as possible of the type of people to avoid if this gets into personal stuff or would be considered gossiping and slander, then feel free to discard. Yeah, so I'm not a huge fan of convict of.

Basing someone's past issues on their future because like people are trying to change and improve and I get that. So if someone's really willingly to willing and trying. Oh, I'm not sharing my screen. Great. Great, great, great, great.

This is the question. There it is. Okay.

Where was I going with that? Okay, if someone's trying to change and improve their life. Like, I give a lot of slack and leeway to someone if they have a bad, spotty past. So when we, like, look at someone's background, like, we, like, it's not a matter of whether or not they get into Augusta, if they have even a pass with the law. Because if people have change, they're moving forward, they're trying to improve that they've served their time and paid for the issues that they went through, and they're trying to improve their life. I'm not going to be like, you can't, you know, you can't take this step in your career. So I don't actually hold a whole lot in the past. However, what people do in. In the current, I am going to judge them on. And so specifically in Dix Hills, it was. There were several things. One, I let him in a second time because his first time he. I had a divorce and it was pretty messy. So I let him back into Augusta after that. I actually ran the location for a year until that all got settled out and then let him take it over. And I did not charge him for basically running that location for a year. Cost me over.

Over 80,000, I can say for sure. I wanted to say 110, but if I sell the. I sold some of the equipment, like, at least 80 grand it cost me to keep it for him, like, let him back in.

Several things that we help that caused us to. Here's the intangibles that are, like, not deal breakers. One, mistreating people on at command center. Two.

Would be.

He wouldn't show up to, like, show up to estimates. He tried to let his manager, like, run the location. Totally fine. But you got to show up to estimates. Otherwise we're not going to help you from command center. Those are the intangibles that, like, hey, we can work around these people go through stuff. I get it. The things that were the deal breakers is death threats against employees.

He was going through another divorce, which got really, really, really, really bad. Legally. He put me on his as the owner of the business and then took insurance out underneath my name and my entity. Not gonna fly. Sorry, bro. So that's it in a nutshell.

Terrell Ek, Boone's Creek, Tennessee. Hey, Mike, is there. Oh, by the way, like, the reason I knew that he took out things is because I got calls from the police because I was in an accident in New York. Yeah, right. Okay. Terrell ek.

Hey, Mike, is there any way that the EDDM flyer. The grass is growing and we are mowing is edible. Before ordering a whole bunch we've been sending them out but but have gotten requests for the core aeration and we have not often that service. Maybe there's a way to edit it on Vistaprint. There's not a Vistaprint. If you're wanting to go through the whole process of changing just that service. You can download the Photoshop files on the dashboard and then upload your JPEG file into.

Vistaprint. If you go to lawncaremedia.com Augusta you can order this specifically to be done for you if there's a big issue and the media team will take off coration and send you back the the file and then you could do it yourself. But we just can't inside Vistaprint have like every variation of services on services off like et cetera. So we've already done multiple variations for mowing. Sorry for not having snow plowing on there but for the intricacies of that you'd have to make that change. I think only a couple people have ever actually made the change and asked the matm do I think it's like 30 to 50 bucks or whatever it is for them to change that for you and then they'll send you an updated one but you can make the order right from LongerMedia.com Augusta goes to the media team here. They'll send it back to you with whatever changes you want.

I personally like if you're getting two or three people asking about this I wouldn't worry about it too much, honestly. You got their contact, you're probably in them for mowing. I wouldn't stress too much about it. Like I'll probably use the ones in in North Carolina that say say snow plowing and I don't think it'll make a difference. Logan from Grand island we are doing our first off site meeting with the Columbus team this afternoon. I'm planning to talk about goals for the year and beyond, briefly on profit loss, talk about PVP for the new employees and a few other small things. What would you recommend talking about during the off site meeting? Yeah, so like you know, spring, you're looking forward. Please, please, please keep in mind that if someone's doing an offsite meeting they don't really care about, they like make the meeting in their best interest. Please don't talk about your goals and how the business is going to do this and that. Like they don't really care unless that directly correlates with how they're going to succeed. Do better, how you're making better opportunities for them to become Managers or be able to grow or make more money or whatever. So focus on them at an off site. That's my opinion. I've seen too many people do three hour long meetings and they're talking about the goals and the projections for the company and they don't ever correlate that with how that's going to actually help the team.

So that used to be my recommendation. Okay, now for a little bit of.

Not so happy Mike. Okay.

So I'm just going to tell you how I feel about a couple things and I'll just do it raw and if you don't like it, that's fine. But this is how I feel, so dig in. Okay, so there are some things in life that I will not tolerate. One of them is.

People who are trying to serve others. And then the people who they are serving mistreat them. I will have no part of that. It's like the equivalent of like people that mistreat the waitress or the waiter, say stupid stuff to the stewardess or the steward in a plane. I have absolutely zero respect for them whatsoever. One second, let me change this over brand. This is now officially changed into education. Okay. And I'm saying this somewhat out of frustration secondarily because I think it'll help hopefully the people that I'm talking to in their business because ultimately this is not necessarily a personality. I think it's a personality issue. This personality trait will affect you very negatively in your business. And so let me be frustrated and then bring it to your business. Okay, here's my frustration. My frustration is that the people at Command center are working extremely hard to make you look good all day long. And they're trying to do things in your best interest of trying to sell jobs for you. They're trying to guard for you when customers are mad. They got plenty of people screaming them throughout the day because of work that you are recruited in did poorly, you messed up, you made a mistake. And yet when maybe, maybe make one error out of a hundred.

The duration and looking down on them is out of control. They're trying to guard for you. I know that employees will make mistakes. They all like that is human nature. They are humans. They have emotions. They do not want to be screamed at. They do not want to be ridiculed. We had someone yesterday, a franchisee, that a mistake was made that was completely honest in terms of someone picking up the phone, helping somebody else that was in need and the customer was on the call, freaking out and then went around us and contacted the owner because they had their text message and berated us. That owner then posted to the chat that the entire team can see that this employee should be fired and put a.

Meme of Trump saying you're fired. I will have absolutely none of that whatsoever. Gives me so mad when that happens. Right? Number one, because that is someone I, that's my job to protect them. That's my job to make sure that they have a safe place to work and I will have none of it secondarily.

To do that publicly is like just immature. Extremely immature. The most important part of this, if you, if you have no care in the world for a human being is this is bad for business. You will never be able to have team members that stick with you. You will never have any good person want to work for you. If that's the way you treat people, they're working for your business. If they're going to make, if they're a good employee and they make a mistake, that is not the time to tell them stupid stuff like you're fired, you, you're horrible and ridicule them, that's garbage. If they're a good employee and they're working all day long busting their butt in your business so you can provide for your family, you need to treat them with respect, right? And when it happens to Sophie that it's the person that I'm supposed to be protecting and that I'm supposed to have a safe place to work and you're doing that now, you have a problem with me. And if that continues for whoever it is, because I don't necessarily even need to know who it is, I will not be happy.

You not treat people like that. You use the system of the yellow slip system. If you have a problem with someone, something that happens at command center, we have fired people and let go people because they make too many mistakes and they have too many yellow slips. That is the system. You do not take it as your personal vendetta to to be rate them publicly on the chats, on connecting. All right?

There are systems in place around service areas not being changed, but once a month there are certain parameters of when we can and cannot take certain services. If you go against those and then you berate people and you get mad at them at command center, you're going to have a personal problem with myself, alright? I cannot keep good people here. It's extremely hard to find, retain and train them. It's extremely expensive. I'm not going to do that. If then the people they're trying to help all day Long are then pushing back on them and saying stupid stuff. You submit a yellow slip, and if you're frustrated, that's fine, but you do not say it to their face. You will have a personal problem with myself.

All right, That's a salty version of Mike. All right. You not treat human beings that way. They have emotions. They also have problems in their family. They also have financial stress. They also have things that they're physically going through. If you treat humans like that, I'm sorry, you will never be a good leader. You will never find good employees. You never really keep them. I don't care what is going through your brain. You cannot treat people like that. All right, enough said.

Questions come in. When is robot mowers gonna take the place in the market? And what will happen to Augusta? Please let us know. I would be thrilled if robot mowers come because it'll take away. Our least. Our lowest margin service was the actual mowing of the property. You still have to be there for edging, blowing off, etc. But the actual mowing is the lowest margin because you need a 5, $10,000 piece of equipment to be going back and forth when you could be using edger or a blower, which is a tenth of the cost.

Here are the edit links to the editable templates. Yes. Thank you for doing that.

Let's go. Cool. Yeah. No, like, hey, look, I get. People make mistakes. I'm not saying that Command center is perfect. We shoot for 99. Anything that we don't think we can do 99% well, we try to eliminate. I know we make mistakes. Trust me, I know that. I know we make mistakes. Especially when there's like, two or three estimators on a location and we're trying to figure out systems for these sort of things. But you cannot blame the. The people that are trying to help you and then be immature and treat them poorly. I think very small of individual. I don't care if you're an Augusta or not. That treats people that are trying to help them with disdain. I think of you as nothing. I think of you as expendable, basically.

All right, cool. All right, guys, have a great day. Sorry. We'll be back to our.