Mike Minutes Mastermind 04/08/2025

Hello, Augusta Nation.

Welcome to the mike minutes, Mastermind. Hopefully you can hear me. Okay, let me make sure my audio is correct. Very good. Alright, let's get this thing kicked off. We'll jump right into questions this morning. Turns out we cannot use ClickUp to use that media board we've been trying to do for the media projects. So we are looking now at Trello. ClickUp was gonna cause all sorts of confusion in terms of people having to sign up for another subscription and everything. So forget that. We're working on Trello though. Probably delayed. I know I was hoping to get done this week, but we will probably have to do it next week just because we are. Zach and I are both on the road so we should have that next week. Though I did make note there was a really good design. I'm forgetting who did it. Sorry. In the Facebook group for treatments and we do have that on something. Throughout this year we have like 30 projects of trying to get like a lot of different instant quote door hangers moved into every door, direct mail for things like postcards, having the QR code on there. So we'll just constantly be doing those throughout the year. But my goal is to get that board up there so I can kind of prioritize the ones that are most impactful to all of you because there's just so many projects for them to do as they go through. Okay. Flyers, door hangers.

Postcards, yard signs, like which ones are we going to do first? And like etc. So hopefully we can get that done next week with Trello and where everyone can upvote the projects that would be most impactful to you so that as the media team starts working on these, we get highest return as soon as possible. So. You got it, Corey. Thank you. All right, thank you everyone. By the way, who jumps on the office hours with Nick? Nick did office hours yesterday for about an hour and 15 minutes, a Zoom call. He does it every single Monday afternoon. He posts on the Facebook group and sends out texts in terms of going on that prior, like 10, 15 minutes before and then super productive conversations on there and then he's recording those. Those recordings are going to go and they are going on the academy. So that way the. If you ever search something like Facebook ads, instead of just seeing it in training, you would actually also be able to search those transcripts of the office hours and actually see the.

Ads being created, like actually going through it individually and it's all searchable by the transcripts. So obviously these are searchable now inside the coaching Dashboard. But from the dashboard itself, you can search keyword, and it will look through all the office hours as well. So that'd be super valuable in terms of just when you're. When you're stuck or trying to find something, being able to look back on those. So shout out to everyone that goes on those live. Super useful, I think, as a method of kind of group training and seeing other people's issues or problems and then seeing their fixes sometimes opens your eyes to the fact that you actually have the same problem. And so one of the things I think is valuable is group training in small group, like 10 to 20 people. Because what happens is someone else starts talking about a problem in their business and you start actually realizing, oh, this is a problem. And I think a lot of times we don't see a problem in the business simply because we just didn't think about it. And so having multiple people in that group having say, hey, man, why is my Facebook ads not working? And all of a sudden you're like, wait a second, I thought of a $70 cost per lead was pretty good. And now all of a sudden they are optimizing to try to get down above below 40. And you're like, oh, that is like, I didn't even see that as a problem in my business. But because I saw someone else trying to optimize their business further than I am, I now see that as an opportunity. So that's why a small group is so powerful. So shout out to Nick for getting that set up, and then it will be going in the dashboard. And I believe he's gonna be doing some more recorded calls as well and then organizing them based upon topic. So that should be super useful, again, mostly for the fact that if you go to the dashboard in that top search bar, use that AI transcript to be able to find anything you're looking for. Well, how do I fill out a coaching scorecard? How do I run the Facebook ad? How do I put up an Indeed ad? How do I manage Spring Rush? Like, these are the type of things that you can. We use that search bar inside the dashboard and why we spent so much time on it last year building it is to make searches everything. And like, it searches every word, it searches every single title, it searches every single chapter, and so it kind of breaks it down by a really good format. All right, let's jump into questions. Looks like we got four today, so feel free. If you are watching this live, in the description, there is the link to submit questions. Ricky from Incline Village. Hey, Mike. Last spring, summer. Oh, real quick. I was going to share some observations. One second, let me see if I can't bounce back. I was okay. So I was talking to some big project.

Companies the other day and man, last week, because of the kind of shock in the stock market with the.

Tariffs, man, they're seeing a huge drop in projects. I think it's going to be short lived. Kind of like Covid was where for like a couple weeks basically projects disappeared. But right now we have high interest rates comparatively. And so projects kind of hit a lull. Like projects went stratospheric in 2020-2021-2022-2023 with interest rates started to really get a hit. They've evened out though now because a lot of the markets have just kind of interest rates came down a little bit. The stock market was on a tear the past 12 months. That's really helped. People that have homes typically have a 401k. They have investments in assets like stocks. Because of that.

They feel richer when the stock market is up. The past 24 months, the stock market has just been up, up, up, up, up, with hardly any deviation from that.

And really that has been the anticipation that interest rates will come down and, and interest rates really have not come down and inflation is still lingering. And so then last week with the tariff scare and the stock market dropping out of the bottom by 15% across the indices, let alone individual stocks that people might be having that have dropped 25, 30, 40%, people that have the money, all of a sudden if they see their 401 drop by 15, 20%, they start to get a little scared. That usually impacts projects first. Last week I had some calls similarly, kind of like Covid where people just freaking out, they're like, we have, we had six months of projects and now we have one month. And so I was, because of COVID I was able to give a little more reassurance that hey, look, this is probably more of a short term scare, don't change your whole business model. But it just really highlights the emphasis on recurring revenue. I have not seen that across the board. I tracked this specifically after last week. Looking at this a lot like we didn't see any drop in close ratio. We've seen increase in the last few weeks just because of the improved workflow of copilot in terms of close ratio. But.

Yeah, like growing a business with recurring revenue is slow and it takes more patience, it's a lot longer.

But in the long run it's much more stable and the revenue doesn't spike up and down. You don't have scares. Like a lot of man, last week that was tough. Like taking a call from someone who has a $10 million business and them saying like we might do 5 million this year if things continue as they are and then being really freaked out because their backlog shrunk from six months to one month, that's like tough. Recurring revenue is a little slower. And so I know it's not as exciting and I know it can be very tempting to grow a business by adding a bunch of projects and more services. I understand that. Like I really understand the inclination to do that.

And but when, when, when like times get like weird, like last week and everything goes crazy, you're like, okay, good thing. Cause like no one, none of my mowing customers decided that they were going to mow their grass because of the tariffs. It was a 50, 60, $70 a week purchase instead of a 5,000, 10,000, $30,000 project that they going to put on ice for a bit and just see what happens with the market. And so especially because like man, now with the media, the way that everyone's so plugged into the media, everyone just gets scared. And so when you're talking about big ticket items, people are much more volatile with their deposits. They're much more volatile. We can see this now. I'm really interested. As we continue to grow copilot, just see like all the data across the different industries to be able to be super precise with this stuff and be like, okay, so we've seen across the board, like deposits have dropped by X amount. I'll really look forward to that. We just don't have the insights right now across different industries, et cetera. But you can already see bits and pieces of it even with the several hundred million that comes through copilot now and then 900 businesses or whatever. So anyways, all that to say those are some of my observations from last week's little scare with the tariff situation. Um, but yeah, Ricky from inclined village. Last spring, summer, we had hundreds of property cleanups. I'm trying to figure out how to get those clients to become recurring per monthly or bi weekly property maintenance. Our average tickets are on six hundred dollars. We usually do a spring and a fall cleanup, twelve hundred dollars total. How would you present the offer to switch from doing two cleanups yearly to a bi weekly or monthly service during these months? Anything to consider. Another thing to another thing to consider is our properties vary significantly. Should I offer a basic package such as blowing debris?

Blowing debris Cleanup and disposal. And then if other services are wanted, the price would increase in there. I would kind of use this kind of like winter services. And they'd be like, hey, it's $1,200 typically for two services. Or we can keep your property looking good year round. It's going to be 24 visits and it's going to cost you $50 per visit. It's around the same price that you spend already. But now the property looks good all the time. And so again, like can you make the $50 visit worth it in terms of blowing things off, you know, weeding any other blowing up, redisposal service, etc. I think you could do that in 30 minutes. And so if you do 30 minutes times 24 for the year, you basically are paying the same amount. So I usually attack these sort of like how do I take a one time job or a reoccurring job, in this case spring and fall cleanups and make it recurring. Typically I'm going to lean into price, I'm going to lean into the option. The fact that hey, you're spending the same amount, it's just not going to look better. And the reason you're willing to do that, you're like, well why in the world would I do that? The reason you're willing to do that, several reasons. Number one, scheduling. It's easier to do scheduling for that recurring instead of trying to schedule big projects. Also now you're able to take on a new customer that does want, does call you during spring cleanup or fall clean up time. You can take them on because this person has annualized out their contract. So scheduling is first thing. Second thing is you don't have to go do an estimate. And so and you don't have to go through the sales process to get them up, get up for the fall and then the cleanup in the spring. It's just like we come to your, your property every two weeks. So the thing you want to be careful of, and this is why it's so important with services, is ensuring that they know how many budget out, like not how many budget hours, but like that you have a fixed amount of time to work there. Because what you want to be careful of is someone signing up for like an annualized service in the middle of fall and then.

Being stuck with the fact that you do all this work extra and then they don't, they stop service three or four months in. So I'm a big fan if you're going to do this is do a cleanup $600 and then you go to them and say, hey, you spent $600, you're probably going to spend $600 again in fall. Why don't we just go ahead and get you on A$49 every two week service year round Property's gonna look great. That makes a lot of sense to people when you start saying, look, it's costing you the same amount. But now we're going to come every two weeks and you don't have to wait for it to look bad before it looks good again. Eric Largo from Florida hey Mike, this might be more of a Liz question, but I was wondering if there was a good way we can format our estimate notes for CC to manually uncheck line items before sending an estimate so the initial displayed total isn't affected. For example, if I go to a property that requests a mowing and bush trimming quote but notice something like a palm tree needed to be trimmed, I like to add that as a recommended item without throwing off the customer. I've tried communicating this request in double brackets to uncheck the item. Okay. So yeah, the unchecking the item thing is they have to create the estimate. They have to go into the estimate and uncheck it. So I have an idea for this.

I don't think land with the CC rep. Is there any already an SMP for this? Perhaps we can default that. If estimators add items designated as recommended, it should be unchecked before sending no. So like I don't even know if you can do that, but if you can do that, it would require them to create the estimate, go into the customer portal from the customer's perspective, uncheck the line item. I'm assuming that's what you're asking. I will say that the new estimate rule out will definitely help things be more clear to customers for picking and choosing line items. But I still wanted to avoid turning someone off before they even dive in the estimate. If customers read everything, that would be helpful, but we sadly can't count on that. Thank you for your insight. Yeah, so.

I would just default to putting it in the title. Honestly.

Instead of telling the expecting the agent to be like hey, this one I want you to go into the customer portal and uncheck it. I don't even know if you can do that. I don't even know if you can do that because then I would imagine a different browser would access the thing and they'd be checked on because you didn't save anything. So I don't even know if this is possible first off. Secondly, if you're like, hey, I just want to throw this on there. I don't think there's any downside to having multiple line items even if the subtotal gets higher because customers can see it pretty easily. They can uncheck things pretty easily. I would also say if you're really concerned about just put like recommended or optional as like all bold as the title of one of the line items like optional, trim palm tree optional, install models, you could do that.

That's probably what I would do down the road. The objective would be to have like customizable tags on each line item. But that's down the road. So for now, like when I do estimates, if I want to do something optional, I'm just doing optional colon and I continue my estimate line item as usual and the customer can uncheck those items if they don't want them. So we just haven't seen a lot of people like see the subtitle and bounce from estimates because it's so easy now to just quickly see the line items and untoggle them. I wouldn't be super concerned about this.

I would honestly, if someone saw a bigger total, they're probably gonna make sure they actually do read the estimate more in detail versus if you leave them unchecked, they just quickly just accept whatever is a low line, low total. So I think if you want this to be done the same way every time, Eric, I'd just make it part of your title, be like optional colon, title of this line item, etc. And just continue that way or recommended or whatever word you want. That way it's being copied and pasted.

Mr. Anonymous, since adding the portion on the contact form on our website about people receiving text, what kind of drop off are we seeing? The way you did it before. So it's been zero, to be honest with you. If anything, it's actually gone the other way. But I actually think that's more of some other stuff we've changed on the form for improvement of conversion. So the reason for that is because if someone doesn't check it, it doesn't force them to not submit the form. So how I was trying to think about this was okay, we have to have this on here for Twilio compliance so we can send out mass texts. And so now I think almost all of Augusta Nation has been put into their own campaign inside of Twilio and Copilot helped us do that. And so that's been really helpful for deliverability. Great. That way it prevents Anything like happened last year ever from happening where someone gets into copilot, they're a spammer and they send out a ton of texts and then it starts to throttle or damage everyone's reputation. Now with everyone in their own campaign, the way that they set it up, it'll be much more secure. So that's good.

But in order to do that, everyone needs to have compliance across their website. So we've done it for over the past six months working with the web team and copilot to make sure that both of those things are kind of done at the same time. And so now inside your form they have to accept the fact that they will see text. But what's really the thing is like I was doing that to get compliance from Twilio and in order to get Twilio to sign off on it, I need that checkbox. However, what I could also do from a web design perspective is decide to not require the text box. In other words, if they don't check that box, we still are collecting in their information and giving them an opt out option. Once they get the text, they can always click stop or like type and stop or tell you hey, I don't want to be responded to and we do remove them. The big thing that Twilio hates is when you have an automated system that doesn't clean out like doesn't respond back to messages. So for example, if a customer says hey, I don't want to be on this, this on your text messaging platform anymore, just take out their phone number if needs be out of their copilot and put it into the customer notes, just you don't want to text them anymore. What Twilio hates is when people are trying to get out of a service or out of a subscription list and they are not able to, whether it be responding with stop or responding and just saying I don't want to be here anymore, that's where you can get into big trouble. And so I made the decision that I trusted everyone in Gusta Nation to not abuse that and like hold on, hold people inside of the inside of their texting platform without just taking out their number. So I trust everyone enough to do that in order to not have to require the field on the form. And for that reason almost everyone just checks it and moves on. But even if they don't, it still comes through the form like normal. So as long as everyone just continues that good practice, which I haven't seen any perpetrators, instead of August Nation, we'll continue to do it that way. That way it doesn't reduce our conversion at all. And it hasn't. So. Good question, Mr. Anonymous. Can you explain some of the possible outcomes from the initial investment round, best and worst case scenarios from an ROI standpoint? Okay, so first off, when you said initial, I don't anticipate ever raising money. I just want to be clear about that. I don't have any anticipation, this being like a series A or series B, et cetera, down the road there's always that possibility. I suppose the only reason we would ever do that is if you were growing so incredibly fast all of a sudden that like we just needed tons of cash. I don't foresee that happening. As long as we continue at our current rate, which is like 30, 40% year over year growth, I don't foresee us needing gobs of more money to just like scale infrastructure extremely fast. I don't see that needed. But if it was ever to happen, none of the investors would be mad about it because it would be meaning that we probably like 2 or 300% year over year growth and everyone would be okay with it. So I don't anticipate that happening. I would hope that we never have to raise a series A or raise any more money after this. Realistically I haven't used any like until next this week we won't get any funds and like I've been funding it all myself and like we actually could probably make it squeakily work. But having this money is gonna help us continue. We hired another engineer or designer this week, another engineer coming in next week and offering another one. It's just going to allow us to go faster.

That first deploy from a couple of weeks ago was good because it was the first deploy actually for almost the entire team working together because there's so much changes since the mass like a year ago. And so it was like we found all the little bumps, the things that we didn't know about, little testing things, et cetera, and we dial those in and in three weeks the next deploy is going out. So I just expect it to go faster and faster and just smoother and smoother. Okay, answering your question. So worst case, let's talk about worst case scenario. Worst case scenario is probably that let's like go way extreme, right? So here, one second, make sure. Boom. Okay, it's showing good, let's go, let's go crazy extreme and then back it off a touch and then go like what I expect and then go like best case scenario. So let's talk about worst case scenario. Worst case scenario is that I take your money, I spend it on a lavish lifestyle and not on the businesses. And.

The businesses don't grow. That would be like worst case scenario. Okay, Worst. Worst case scenario, they don't grow. The businesses actually lose all their money and they go bankrupt and you lose all your money. That is the worst possible outcome of the investment. Let's take it back.

Okay, that was weird.

Okay, thank you, Brent.

Okay, so that was extreme. Worst case scenario. Now let's worst case scenario is that this Internet doesn't work. Goodness gracious. Give me one second, let me get this back up.

Sorry, everyone. I know every time I go, I go out of town in airports and hotels. The Internet's just horrible. So I apologize. The alternative is I don't do these. So I apologize. Even though I'm traveling, I try to do these every day almost. So I think it, despite the Internet, it's still better that I do nothing. Better than I doing nothing. So worst case scenario is that. Let's back it up a little bit. Like, what's a more realistic form of bad case scenario? Bad case scenario is I have the window of eight to 12 years that we're shooting to go public. Let's assume we just don't grow enough. The group business are going. Okay.

Okay. And we're back again. I'm really sorry.

I'm trying to upgrade my Internet, but I did it last night and it seems to have been fine until now. So I do apologize.

Sorry, nothing I can do. Okay. I will continue and I will just watch the Internet and if it drops, I will pause and wait for it to come back. So 12 years would go by and then basically what happens is we would have to convert everyone in from the safe into equity at. Let's just. And it'd be a private company. So that's like, that's like kind of the, the more valid option of a worst case scenario is 12 years go by and still we haven't gone public. And the businesses say worth a valuation of like 3 to 500 million. And we need to convert from into equity at that point. That, that we don't want that. The IPO makes it much easier for everyone to liquidate and be able to. If they want to sell their shares, they can. And so that would be my objective. So that's probably the worst case that is like Most plausible is 12 years go by and the business has not gone public. And we need to convert the safes into equity. It's not like they become, you know, worthless. If we don't go public. It's just a matter of they need to be converted into equity. And so that would be probably the worst case. And then if you wanted to sell, you'd have to find a secondary buyer. So someone else that wanted the equity, you have to find them. Whereas an IPO makes it very easy to trade the shares. And so that's why the objective is to go public. So that's probably worst case scenario that is most plausible. All right, now let's move up a little bit. Let's be like, hey, let's say what does Michael expect to happen? This is what I've been more public about. We want to be over a billion dollar valuation. So let's just say it's 1.2 billion. Someone did $25,000 now and in 8, 10 years we go public and the valuation is 1.2 billion. Basically $25,000 in would be a million dollars as a, you know, the valuation of those shares. Now I'll be honest, when we go, if and when we go public, I will likely not sell anything because if you look at, and this is something that we will cross this bridge when we get there. But if you look at most companies, when they go public, assuming they are profitable, they usually it's a really bad idea to sell out shares during, after an ipo. Now if you're doing like a spac where it's a very, very high risk investment, there's no like they're burning hundreds of millions of dollars a year. They're just burning money on the customer acquisition. They don't really have a great product. They have no word of mouth, et cetera. Like if you have a product like that going public, that's when usually people will sell out and there's like a bubble and they drops 90%. Right. Basically a rug pull. That's what happened in 2020, a bunch of SPACs. But if you look at most companies like say for example, like Microsoft, if.

Gates had not have sold any of his Shares since they IPO'd, I think his net worth would be something like $1.5 trillion. But he sold off, you know, 75, 80% of his shares and that so his, his value, the value of his net worth goes down. So I will, I will probably not share sell anything. Obviously that's still a ways away and I would be pretty, I'd be as transparent as I possibly can be about that. It is always a negative thing in my opinion. When the founder starts selling off a ton of the shares, they have to have liquidity. You know, the founder has to have make a living. And if they're not taking a salary, they've got to do something with their shares. However, if someone's selling off like 75, 80, 90% of their shares, that's to me is a red flag. Whether you look at like Nikola, what happened with Nikola. A couple other examples of this where all the executives are selling off their shares once they go public, that's a huge red flag. So to me that, that would be the more common stance is like 1.2 billion would be a valuation, we're doing that in eight to 10 years, etc. And then that would be your return on investment, you know, 25,000 in at a $30 million cap at a $1.2 billion valuation. If we were to IPO at that, that puts you at a million dollars of value on a $25,000 safe. That being said, let's go one step above, which is like, what's the best case? Actual basic best case scenario? Actual best case scenario is we don't have to wait 10 years. I have been very clear, it's 8 to 12 years of investment window. I would like that to be more like six to seven. I'm just not saying that on the investment video and I'm not telling that to anyone else. But like this is best case, basically based case scenarios. Like if we were talking about like the 5% chance of Michael being bad with money and bankrupting the thing, let's look at the 5% of like best case scenario. And that is like we're going to, we would be far above 1.2, more in the realm of 2, 2 to 3. And like I have the math on what we need to be on that, but we do it in like six years. And so, you know, the valuation, obviously the value of the safe would go, the equity would go far, far higher. But more importantly would actually be the timeline. Like no one wants to wait 12 years. Let's be honest, that's the worst case. Like the, as far as I put it out, just to set everyone's expectations there. But like more ideally It'd be like six to seven years. I would like to beat the eight year thing personally. So I've said eight to 12, I would like to beat that. And if we can, if we able to beat the timeline and then also absolutely crush on the valuation, that's, that'd be great. So those are like the best case and worst case. And then like slightly inside of those from a return investment perspective. And.

You know, from my perspective, I really can't change a whole lot of those outcomes other than just focusing on the product. And so whether that from a software perspective and just like all the engineers and getting the right people on the bus, whether it be inside of Augusta, being able to really refine processes and like, it's been very positive this past several months. Just a lot of the changes we've made. And so, like, we've had. We have one of the best MPS scores of any franchise I know as of recently. And that's up from like, last year where it was not as good. So, like, we've been slowly increasing it and like, making better changes, better support, improving the coaching program, improving lots of aspects. So that's a good thing. And so if I was an investor, those are the type of things I'm looking for. Is like, is it a good product? Like, do people like it? And so, like with Copilot, our MPS scores are nowhere close to where they are at Augusta, and it's because of what happened last year. So we have a lot of work to do in that front. The nice thing is the challenging part with, say, a franchise is, let's just say our NPS scores was like 71. That's really good. And so I might have gone up a little bit, but it was like 71. So.

If you had that in software, we could. Tomorrow we'd be selling like thousands of people a day or hundreds. Hundreds of people a day. You can't do that with the franchise. There's so much more infrastructure we have to build. And so.

The likely scenario is that the franchise is the slow builder that is constantly paying the bills for the company. It is very sticky and it is a, quote, unquote, boring business in terms of the franchise. There's nothing super crazy about it. It's more of a different model that people now are starting to take notice of in the franchising world. But it's nothing new or like new technology. What will, what will likely happen, though, from a valuation perspective is as the CRM over the next couple years gets to that same level of MPS score, which is the goal it can scale because software. So, like, I don't need to train people for weeks and months on anything in order for them to sign up for a trial versus with franchise. Like, we have two week disclosures and then we have two weeks of like, there's a way more.

Legal stuff around, like scaling a franchise. Like, if I Tomorrow sold 100 locations, we would probably be under investigation legally from the franchise. Perspective because there's so much red tape in that world. And so where with software, if we were able to get our MPS score to 71, the thing would scale like, scale like a weed. And so there's like this is where I believe though, the value of the entity is important. And that is we have the franchise, the kind of quote unquote boring cash machine, and then we have the software which has the ability to scale once we get the product where it needs to be at. And then you have the media side that drives awareness to both of those things. And we can get a low, if not negative customer acquisition cost. That's where I see the value. I've made that clear in the investment side of things. So yeah. All right, next question is from Mr. Anonymous. I haven't hired an employee yet, but I'm getting close to capacity. The plan is to bring on an employee this year, but not yet. There is a company you can hire to do door to door hangers for you. I'm currently in our spring rush and a couple leads come in each day. Should I use a company to door hangers for me? Well, I do them in my free time. We have 11,000 to put out and we just. And it's just me on my own. I have to, I have the cash to pay for this help. Yeah. So like it comes out to, you know, how much they, how much is it costing you? Right. So are they gonna deliver? You know, per 100, it costs you $30. That's not so bad because if you were hiring someone and they were putting out 70, 80 an hour and you're paying 20 bucks an hour, that'd be about the same amount. But if they're gonna charge you a dollar per, then we got a problem. So it just comes down to like their rate, like the cost because ultimately all of it. When any marketing channel comes down to my cost per lead and my customer acquisition cost. And so yeah, if someone could deliver them and they're actually delivering them, then I would be vetting that because it's nice thing about having an employee like you can tell them, hey, you're getting tracked. You got to wear this watch or like you got to have this on so you can actually see are they actually going to every house versus like this is this delivery service subcontracting it off to a 16 year old? The 16 year old saying yes, I delivered them all. Taking pictures of 20 or 30 and throwing, you know, 2,000 in the garbage. Then we got ourselves a problem. But assuming that the math makes Sense, I don't have a problem with hiring outdoor hangers.

Mr. Anonymous. I said I would put in a significant amount of money in the MIC investment. My stock portfolio, which is where my money is coming from, got cut almost in half since then, which makes me extremely frustrated. I am tempted to wait two to three months hoping my portfolio goes back up. But I also don't want to miss out on the investment opportunity. What do you suggest? Okay, I will give plenty of heads up. I know a lot of people are worried about this. We are still several hundred thousand dollars from us being close to filling the round. I will not pull this out on anyone and be like, all right, tomorrow if you're not in, it's done. Like, I will give you heads up if we're getting close. So, yeah, like, I know right now, like, it's not a great time to be pulling out of stocks. I would also say if you want to try to lock in losses, that wouldn't be a horrible idea. So if your businesses, you've been growing them and it's like year three, four and five and you know they're starting to become profitable, maybe it's not a horrible idea to take to lock in losses. So I did this back in 2022 when the stock market crashed is I sold everything and then converted over index funds because when they're low, I can sell, claim the loss and then go buy them inside of an index fund so I can still ride them back up like we have the past two years. So this is also another option. So let me see one second. Make sure. Okay, cool. So for example, I don't want, I'm not saying this is what you should do, but if you want to, if someone, if someone out there in house individual stocks and you want to lock in your losses, sell the, sell the stocks. And usually you have a wash rule where you can't go buy, like sell a stock and then buy it tomorrow and then claim losses. That would be the wash rule. It would not. You would not be able to claim losses on your tax return. However, what you can do, and I don't recommend someone buying and holding in their breath for 30 days and hoping because usually what happens when you sell 30 days later, it's back up 20%. You have to buy higher. So don't recommend that. But what you can do, and this is what I did back in 2022, is sold all individual stocks and you buy index, index indices or indexes that hold those same stocks. So you're like, well, I still believe in These businesses. I still believe in these five or ten companies a lot. Great. I'm going to go find indexes that only hold those businesses. So like the Mag 7, if you're like, well, the Mag 7 have been beat up, great. I believe they're still long term great businesses. Okay, great. Sell them individually, then buy indexes that have them and you'll ride them back up, but then be able to lock in those losses. So that would be an option, but just from the mic investment side of things, I am not going to be like, hey, tomorrow you must get it in. We still have a good chunk left and everyone that has expressed interest has the ability to be putting their funds in. I think this week actually started last week, so it just won't be a mad dash. I'm watching it. I'm making sure as it goes up, I give plenty of heads up and there's just no rush. So.

All right, I think that's all for our responses today.

Oh, we got some questions in here. Very good, Mike. Morning, Mike. With weekly mo customers, are there any locations charging.

CC weekly but sending the invoice monthly? Were there pros and cons? Oh, charging credit card. Okay, great. We're on the same page. Sorry, there's about five cc's now. I have because there's control center, we have inside copilot, there's command center, there's credit cards. They say we get confused. Okay, with weekly mo customers, are there any locations charging credit cards weekly but send an invoice monthly? What are the pros and cons of this method? Okay, so if I was personally. So I don't know right off the bat, Jordan, of like, here are the locations that are doing that. I know there's a lot of locations charging weekly. I don't think any locations are charging weekly and sending the invoice monthly. The reason is because.

There'S several reasons. The main thing is.

I think if you're charging weekly, there's really no point to be sending out an invoice receipt. Also, if you send out an invoice receipt at the end of the month and you've charged them three times, there is a likelihood they will say, oh, I didn't want service this month. I want those refunded. And now you're kind of stuck because you've already performed the services. So in my opinion, if you're charging weekly, I am simply telling the customer if they ever have questions about their bill, like, hey, I can send you your customer portal login because they have a login and Password, they can always go in there, check it, they can see when the next services are on the schedule. So I would, I'm inclined, I'm like, the more and more people do this, I just keep seeing it more and more often work well. And that's like don't be sending out invoice receipts. And so if you're doing it monthly, it starts to make more sense because like people start to forget, especially if they don't live at their house, they forget the fact that they even have you doing their service and they see this bill on their invoice or on their credit card statement and they need to have something to match it up with. But I'm seeing more and more, even big companies where they will just simply tell you like, hey, we charged your account. If you would like to log in, here's your account information. Or like click here to log in and see your, your payment details. Instead of actually attaching an invoice, instead of like showing how much they charged inside of the email, it's just simply saying like hey, we charged your account, it was auto billed. If you'd like to log in, click here. So I'm seeing that more and more even from bigger businesses and I think that's the route I would go. If I'm doing weekly billing, I don't, I probably wouldn't even be sending the invoices out. I would probably just be telling them hey, they can log in. I would probably send out invoices only for one time jobs where I'm charging larger tickets. But if I'm charging 50, 60, $70 a week, I'm probably going to charge their card and if they have a problem with it, they'll call me. You could even put inside, I know some people have done this inside your inside stripe. You can change what they see on their credit card statement. You can put like their phone number on there. So it makes it really easy for them to contact you.

So yeah.

Feel free. Jordan 2 if you want to put this in the Facebook group, you might get some other ideas in addition I just mentioned there, but I'm just seeing more and more, even big businesses move this direction. That is if you're charging on some sort of frequency and auto charge, they're just gonna send you an email that says like we charged your account, log in here. And they want people to log in to see that amount. And honestly if I was charging weekly, I don't even think I would send a monthly saying that I would just keep going until they contact me and Then make it easy for them to contact you with like a phone number inside the credit card statement. That's like the easiest way to do it.

What about a private Reddit group for upvoting?

Okay, I'll mention to Zach, I do like the aspect of Trello or like a they had in ClickUp, which is like a board so you can kind of see which designs are like in status in progress right now. That's our goal too because they're always working on so much and can. Unless you're like actively watching on the.

Pro shop and seeing new designs, it's sometimes you don't see anything. So just so this full insight, I'd like it to be where they can. You can kind of see all the to dos and you can upvote those and then you can also see what they're currently working on and then what's actually like as it gets moved to done, you could see, oh like there's new, new designs popping up in here. So that's kind of the goal is more of a project board also making everyone have to get a Reddit account. I feel like some people would be wasting some time if we made that a requirement. All right, everyone, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your Tuesday. We will see you tomorrow. Love you all.