Mike Minutes Mastermind 04/11/2023

Hey everyone, hope you're doing well. Go ahead started.

Just drop this in the Facebook group.

Right.

Before we get started, I just want to go real quick over some P4P stuff. I know inside of the software you now have the ability to adjust with manual adjustments. You can do it to just P4P or you can do it for base pay.

And P4P. Some people asked why we have not allowed the option for base pay only. And we can't really figure out a reason why legally someone would want to change someone's base pay. That should be like set in stone. You don't really play with it.

Unless you're trying to take away money from someone's base pay, which we don't want to allow. So let me explain though a couple things here.

So instead of showing you here, let me just show you here. So this would be if you're adding someone's bonus or manual adjustment, you could throw that word in there too.

For base pay and beaver P. This in this case, this person would be a low performer. But you could flip it to where someone's high performing and they have more PPP than base. When you add a manual adjustment to both, they are going to get that bonus regardless of whether they're high or lower performer. Does not matter. Now if you add it to P4P only, for example, it's not gonna have any effect on their paycheck because remember, they're going to get paid the higher of these two. And so adding the bonus to only their P4P potentially they might never see it. So if someone gets a $50 employee referral.

You need to add it to base Pay and their P4P so they make you make sure they actually they see it if they're a lower performer.

In this case, this person gets a bonus. But because you've added to only P4P, if they're a lower performer, they're new, they're gain trained, they would actually not see that bonus. So that's why we've allowed the ability to where you add to base pay and P4P or just P4P. Because there are some bonuses that you would add only to P4P in the form, you know, depending on whatever circumstance you have. Right. That where they would have to if they're below base pay, they wouldn't see it. This is mostly what P4P is in terms of, you know, crushing on a day. You don't actually see it if you just crush one day. If you're way behind your base pay for the pay Period. Now, this is kind of why we don't you. We don't allow for you to only put it on someone's base pay. But if you did and you had a high performer and you only added this base, this, this bonus to their base pay only, again, same thing would happen. They would never see that bonus because they're already a high performer and they're already earning more than this combined. So it will have no impact on their paycheck. So just wanted to share that right now though, that bottom one, we don't even allow it to affect just base pay. It's where you are affecting just P4P and it defaults to that. Or.

You can add to both and you want to add to both. If you're doing a manual adjustment for like shop time bonuses with them, doing referrals or bringing new employees to your team, those are things that you would want both affected to make sure they realize it, regardless if they're a high or low performer. Won't matter. So.

All right, let's jump into some questions.

By the way, Thursday, this coming Thursday, we have the roundtable. Looking forward to that. Have some announcements. And so should be about 15, 20 minutes worth of announcements. I know Lee and Chuck are going to talk a little bit about some GM stuff, general managers, how to manage them, etc. So whether or not that is current for you or that is a couple years down the road, they will talk a little bit about that. In terms of what the expectations are for gm, I highly recommend if you have general managers, they all be on the call for the roundtable. Okay, let's go ahead and share.

All right.

Devin from Red Deer, Alberta, nobody opened my estimates on coppa. I took off the default PDF because they could click Accept. Now I just send the estimate with the highlighted link, but nobody clicks the link. It's really fresh because I'm paying a $27 call and getting no. 1. Do you have any tips? Thanks. Let's see what this says.

Okay, I know what this is. So iOS just updated our images.

This is happening a lot, a lot of CRMs right now and any, any third party is. They're filtering in our images. We have an idea of what, what is causing this though and are going to try to get around it by using what's called S3 instead of AWS to host these instead of what we're currently using to host. I think that's what you're talking about. I took off the default PDF because they could.

Click Accept. Now I send this here one Second. Okay, so.

Let'S keep this inside of the Copilot Facebook group for now just because this is.

Not really Augusta related yet since no one's using it. Yeah, keep this in the Facebook group for now. On the Facebook support. I'm not really understanding what you're saying. I just send the estimate with a highlight link, but nobody clicks the link. It's really frustrating because I'm paying.

I would change the formatting of your email to make it look like that link is bigger. Like bold it make it bigger.

You could even put like click this link colon and then have the link. So that would be my recommendation.

Also use the emails that we dropped into your account that are going to be already formatted and worded to where the link is more prominent. Like more. It's more obvious that that's what they need to click on. This is a picture of only yesterday's Google performance Max ad. Why is there 49 spent when the budget is set to 25 a day, it's likely that you.

It's likely that it's across the board, $25 a day. So if you go back over the week, it's gonna look like closer to $25 a day. If you go for the month, it's almost nailing it on $25 a day. So this is when you're setting up the ad. When it comes your budget, you can allow it to be more flexible to where when there's like really good weather, for example. Like I would highly recommend having this to where when there's like a surge in clicks, it allows you to spend more money. But then when it's days when there's not a lot of clicks, it's not trying to force to spend the $25. So go to your week up here. Go to your your week or month and I'm confident that's going to closer to $25 per day and around a month. It almost nails it right on typically.

All right.

Devin. Red Deer, Alberta. Hey Mike, can you please talk about how growth sucks cash? I'm on my fourth summer this year. I'm so low, but I eventually want to hit 500 to a million. There's 100k people here should to hit 200k this year, then run to 700 to 800k or should I grow slowly? I'm not sure what I should do doing with my money, to be honest. I want to grow, but I don't have budget. Devin, you're gonna have to wait until you come to training in July. I know You're. I know you're itching and you're in spring rush, but all of this gets trained. At training, we talk about the different stages of growth, we talk about when to pause, growing, etc. So you have to wait just a little bit bit. All right, next one's from Landon Smith, Tallahassee, Florida. Unfortunately, my close ratio this month was really low when I need it to be high as I'm in growth mode. My close ratio in March was 20 Mercy and my close ratio for this month so far is around 25. I charge 75 per hour and charge no dump fee fee or anything. No dump fee or anything. I'm really struggling with this as I can't, I just can't figure out why. I call after sending estimates to follow up. I tried to use scarcity closing and offer discounts, but nothing seems to work. I very rarely will crush budget hours, so I feel like I'm not too far off when on those when estimating.

About 95% of estimates I've sent so far have been for cleanups or projects. I thought about just subcontracting 30% from my subtracting 30% from my budget hours and seeing where that gets my close ratio. But then my new hires will get no P4P at all. I'm about 1.5 weeks booked out now and have some pending estimates. So I want to hire, I want to do whatever I can this year to get my close rate up to 70% does my fear but my fear is that the only way to do do so is to adjust the budget hours to unbeatable for the crew. Does a 30% idea seem like the right move or would you recommend something else? Thanks. So I'm, I'm not opposed to short term lowering the price to increase from 1.5 books weeks, we got to say three or four. And then you're like, okay, now I can raise my prices back up. Because I would imagine you're getting enough estimates with during spring rush that literally if you brought your prices down and you're able to close 50, 60, 70% of your estimates for even a, you'd probably immediately be three to four weeks booked out and then you'd have the confidence to raise your prices again. And I know it sounds counterintuitive. It's like, well, why wouldn't you just wait a few more weeks and it would catch up. Yes, that's probably the case. You go into spring rush, you're already a week and a half booked out. If you waited like three or four weeks, you're probably going to be a three weeks booked out even if you have 25, 30% close ratio. That being said, if you want to make this go faster and you're in a rush and you're in growth mode, what I would do is like temporarily lower the price. Get the, get the. If you're, we can have booked out, literally by the time you're hitting the jobs that you sell, you will be so far booked out you're now raising the prices. You could do that. Like you can immediately do that.

I would be looking at.

How, what I'd be concerned about is, and this sounds like you've already thought about this, but I don't know how, how long you've had employees. And that is, I'd be looking at the jobs that are completed. Are the guys like beating budget hours so much and you're actually overestimating how many budget hours because it has, it might have nothing to do with your pricing. It's just you're putting way too many budget hours and you're being way too generous with budget hours. And I was like, oh, my prices are too high. It's like, no, your prices aren't too high. Like you're pricing a dollar per hour rates. What's too high is that you're constantly budgeting too many hours. So, um, if you bring your budget hours down, like cut it by say 25% of what you think at the job is going to take, I would be very interested to see what happens to the crew. Do they actually not make P4P or are you over budgeting your budget hours significantly? And I've seen this happen before, especially if you're brand new to employing people and you're not used to yet like having employees and how fast exactly they work and things like that. Feel free to use the, hey, let's cut, cut up my, like if I think this is going to take 10 hours, I'm going to go ahead and put seven and a half, 25%. Don't change your rate, just change your budget hours. That will affect the price. You could absolutely do that.

And then you literally in a week or two of having a higher close ratio. If you're at say 25% right now, close ratio and you change it to 50% and then you're going to spring rush when you're also having elevation increase number of estimates being sold or estimates being had, like new leads, you're going to triple the output that you're having in terms of new jobs. So you'd Literally fill your schedule so quickly. You literally might do this for a week and a half, be three, four weeks booked out and then like, okay, I gotta find an employee and put these prices back up because I can't keep taking all these jobs on. So it's a good problem to have. Don't stress about it.

Devin from Red Deer how should I pay myself and how should, how should I pay myself and how should, how much should I pay myself? Should I run myself on P4P and book it through QuickBooks and the CRA etc? Yeah, so I would not. If you're in growth mode, you don't want to be paying yourself an actual like in the US W2, you guys would run it through the CRA up in Canada. I would not recommend running it through that because you're basically taking that all up money and put it back into the business. Still. I would only give myself an actual paycheck and run it through the CRA or a W2 on our side of the border. If you are an S corp and you need, you have to pay yourself a salary. If you're in growth mode and you're just getting started and you're working out the field, it's very likely that your profits are so low you're not needing to be an S corp and there's no tax advantage to it. I'm just not as familiar with the Canadian S corp like what that definition looks like. But I would go, I'd venture to believe that if you're out in the field working, I would pay myself a P4P. I would not write myself a, a check or run it through payroll, but would do a distribution based upon my P4P. If I was out in the field working and I just do a distribution into my personal account, for example. But again, remember it's a pass through entity so your profits are going to be realized regardless of the money stays in the business account or your personal account. It does not matter. You will pay taxes on the profits of the business regardless of it's in the business or in your personal account. Okay, so you just, you just can't write off, you can't take deposit, you can't deposit money in your personal account from the business and then make that an expense. You can't do that unless you are running it through payroll. So your bookkeeper and CPA should catch that sort of thing. But you definitely can't do that. You can't, you can't pay yourself as an count consider wages. If you're not Running it through payroll. It's just at that point you just, you mark as like owner's investment or owner's distributions, and that's a balance sheet item. But you're still going to tax on that income.

How many solos went into full service or in the process? You can't go full service until you are a growth model. But I'd say there's at least five or six that are already inside their one year that they'll be counting down because they're already over $20,000 in monthly revenue. So within the next year they'll have to switch to growth. $75 is high for Florida. Right now I'm doing weekly invoicing. Should I send the receipt every week? I'm not trying to get sent to spam. Keep in mind two things. One, if you're using service autopilot, there's. They're already getting an email that they're getting charged as a receipt. Same thing with Zooper. There's a stripe that they could be getting a stripe receipt automatically. You can put that in your account, in your stripe account if they, if you want that to happen, you can make that happen. That way you would not have to send a paid invoice receipt. However, most of the time, customers like just getting an email, say, hey, your invoice has been paid and here's a link to it and your invoice is attached and just as paid on it. That way they can see that an itemization of all their services, whereas the automated receipts from a processor like stripe or clearance is just gonna be like a dollar amount and looks like a receipt, but doesn't have like your itemized services and the details of the visits. So that's why typically, even if you're charging everyone's card, we like to send out that paid invoice receipt, that email. If you're doing it weekly, that starts to become the question, right? And that's the drawback of doing weekly invoicing. If you're. Or daily even is that you're sending more emails. If you're sending them that paid invoice receipt. So there's a trade off. It's just which one do you want to have? Right. So I would probably tend towards. I'd have to think about that one. But if I was doing weekly invoicing, I would probably just charge their card. And then maybe at the end of the month they get a paid invoice receipt that shows all of those potentially.

But it's either a, you're taking the hit of More emails, which means less open rate on your one click estimate emails. More likelihood people are going to cancel service or change their service schedule. Much higher if you're emailing them more frequently. The flip side is if you don't do that and you don't email them, don't send them a receipt, there's a higher likelihood that they're going to call and they're going to freak out over, you know, previous invoices that were charged to them. So that's a really individual thing that you would have to determine. Talk to a coach on your coaching call to see what they kind of would recommend for your personalized situation and which one of those is more important to you. Like for me, when I'm in growth mode or in profit mode and I do do not want to spend money on marketing, I protect my one click estimate email like, like it is everything to me because it is the source of all my leads. So I don't want to dilute people's email inboxes with those. That being said, potentially what you do is you maybe text them something more frequently like an invoice receipt for example. But again, like I would get annoyed if someone was sending me weekly text messages of an invoice, right? So you just got to be careful. The video I made of that company up in Calgary, Canada about emailing people too often and they were contacting people way too often and they literally, they did only treatments and they, they had three to five services in their packages, three to five visits I should say of depending what package they're selling. And they were sending people 4 NPS, net promoter score like surveys. They were calling them, they literally called them, basically called or emailed them for every single service of the year in terms of count. And they were trying to do it like two and three weeks, two and three months before the spring rush started. Too much communication, man. People are going to always be reminded that you're coming, they're going to cancel more often, they're going to change their schedule more often and they're going to be more.

They'Re going to be numb to your communication to where when you actually send a sales document and you need someone to click on something or take action on something or opt in, they're just less likely because they, they just, they've seen so much communication. So.

That'S all I got for today guys. Have a great rest of your week and just eat the elephant one bite at a time. I know it's overwhelming with spring rush. When you wake up there's probably 10,000 things you can or should be doing. I know. It's like right now, whether it be bugs in P4P and co pilot things we're trying to do there, you got people that are sick, you got people that are stressed out. You're gonna like, all of this is part of the spring rush. So you plan for as much as you can, and then when you hit it and you're in the moment, you simply have to determine which one's the most highest priority. Like prioritize, execute on those things from top to bottom and ask yourself, what are the things you must get done today versus the things that can be done tomorrow? And you got to get comfortable with having a to do list that doesn't get completed every single day. Just gonna have to. Otherwise you will never sleep. Ever. All right, guys, have a good one. Take care.