Mike Minutes Mastermind 04/12/2024

And we're live. Welcome everybody. Hope you're doing amazing. Happy Friday.

We are not too far away from the Memphis meetup. So, Kevin Fairburn, feel free to post it in the Facebook group a little more often, reminding people you do need to sign up and get a ticket. I know, Kevin. Nick, There's a lot of people that put a lot of work and effort into this. And so they, they do need signups and registrations because they got a plan for things. So.

Do I have that already on the dashboard as a link? Let me think, let me think. Let me look, let me look.

I have not put it on there yet. I will put on the main page of the dashboard right below what's new to destination. I will put a update button to register for that.

For that event coming up in a couple months. Also next Tuesday is our quarterly roundtable. So Q2 roundtable 2024 gonna be at.

4Pm Pacific Standard Time, 7pm Eastern Standard Time, and there'll be some cool updates for that. So looking forward to sharing then.

Let'S jump into questions.

What am I missing? Oh, there we go. Sorry. Reload Facebook.

Sometimes Facebook doesn't go right away. There you go. Okay, we're good now. Share screen. Foreign.

Up is from Tarvin. All right. On one of the C suite pods, you mentioned that America's debt is getting so large that eventually the US Will be forced to go back to the gold standard and reset its currency. Do you feel this is a threat in the next 10, 15, 20 years? Curious. How do you how you would go about protecting yourself during this time? Or is this something that wouldn't even be on your radar? Just continue to build the businesses. Correct you are. Just continue to grow the businesses. It'd be like saying I'm gonna barter in chapsticks and then I'm gonna switch it to bartering in.

Pens. If I have something like my AirPods a value, it'll just switch the measurement from. From chapstick to. Oh, by the way, chapstick provided by.

The Cohen's. Thank you very much. I use it all the time right here on my desk.

Mindy. Anyways, you're just switching the value measurement, right, from dollars to say, the gold standard. Whether that happens in 10 years or 100 years, I don't know. And so I can't control that. I'm not going to buy a bunch of gold either. So that's just my 2 cents in my opinion, could be wrong.

All right, this is from Mr. Anonymous. Thinking about hiring GM. That is very rough around the edges. Okay. All right, here we go. Oh, I see you probably have a GM in mind. Okay, good idea. Probably having no name on this one. Let's go. I have someone that has worked for us for a year, has always been a top performer, so 20 minutes early, is very interested in keeping up with the P and L and wants to improve his skill set, likes to train new people, et cetera. Also, he works like an absolute dog when it comes time to get work done. However, he is very unpolished. His communication skills verbally and through digital channels are lacking a little bit and will need cleaning up. He will require a bit of investment to get him to learn the ins and outs of the business, computer stuff, estimates, etc. I guess any new GM requires that investment though. Also I do do know that we will need to work on his professionalism. I think that this person could become a good GM but will require a lot of coaching investment into. I'm fine making the investment. I'm. I guess I'm just wondering if it's worth it. I don't want to lose him. However, I also don't want him to put the business in jeopardy by making the wrong hire and consequent and subsequently have to fire him anyway because that. Would this be someone you'd invest into? Okay, this is a great question and it is my opinion that there are some people that are great team members and when put in places of leadership, you actually are setting them up for failure because they're not a good leader. And I'm not saying this about this person, I'm just making a different statement. I'll come back around to the question.

So be careful of that. Just because someone's a great team member, they kick butt, they make great P4P and they show up early. Don't just assume that they'll somehow then be a great leader. It's a different role. It's a completely different position. Now in our line of work, most great leaders I see are a little bit rough around the edges and they aren't super, super polished because usually the guys in the field would rather listen to someone that's like them.

I would say this, you can reduce the amount of risk involved here by slowing it down. So instead of trying to make him a gm, I would say, hey, are you interested, number one in being a gm? Let's not assume that. So I've seen consistently people put in places of leadership and they actually do a horrible job. It's like man, they should just stayed as a team member. They were crushing it. So be careful of that. It's very difficult for people to take a pay cut and a demotion once they've been put into the wrong position and they're actually not fit for it and it doesn't serve them super well, but they still will not want to go back to being a team member.

I think you could do this slower and that what you could do is say, okay, you're crushing on all these levels. Do you want to become a general manager? Okay, you do. Fantastic. I will create a list of all the things that would need to be improved or changed in order for that skill set to be utilized. And then you could just make a list for them. Like, hey, you're gonna learn about software. You know, you can go take P4P University, you can go take Tope University and then just see if they're hungry enough to actually go do that. If they're willing to do that without like you micromanaging them and on their own dime on the weekends, etc. Shows a lot that they are willing and likely to change. A lot of times too when it comes to quote unquote rough edges. People will start reading books and realizing that like to be a better leader. Some of those rough edges they might have to like sacrifice their own opinions or like their creative or personal things in order to be a better, better leader. But sometimes that comes after seeing a lack in themselves and that sometimes that lack is not seen, the gap is not seen until they're put in a place of leadership and realize that they're in equipped and then they will usually turn to you and be like hey what do I do here? And that's when you I recommend putting pushing them towards the books because then someone else is telling them that they should quote it like shave. You know, they should be more clean when they're talking to people and doing sales. When they're leading their team, they should speak with authority and speak with speak to them in their eye and not like looking at the ground. Those are the type of things that they'll pick up in the book instead of you having to like rail on them about how to talk to people. So that was just my two cents. You could probably do this in a much more even slower way. Nick Reed Marysville, Washingtone if my organic website ranking is beating my Google Pay per click ad, is there any point to running it? My paid ad isn't even showing up on the first page. There is point to running it. It's also your browser. Realize everyone always thinks that like whatever they're seeing on their page is going to be what everyone sees. That's not the case. And even if you run incognito, it's not what everyone's going to see. I would say you could switch to Incognito and see things actually changed around. Every single user is being treated differently based upon their behavior. Also where they're currently at when they search. And like a gazillion other things that go into the algorithm of who ranks the ads. Not just native search, like where you're ranking on search, but also where the ads show up. Right. So you might show up on the bottom of page one for the Google Ad because there's some down there. But then you might be ranked first in terms of native search. Fine.

They won't get to your ad if they click on your ad if you're on your website up front at the top. So you don't have to worry about it. You'll never even get an impression. So I wouldn't correlate that in any way. It's a market and they have to fill the ad spots on a page. They're not going to always put you on the first one. They're going to put between all the different people that are bidding on that keyword, that market, that demographic, etc. Calfrey from Bloomington, Illinois. I had a customer that was found deceased in their home this morning after a welfare check prompted by a neighbor. Gives me the creeps a bit about finishing the property cleanup. This person has a card on file. Would you continue mowing for this person until the family contacts us? We have no reach way to reach them directly. I would personally, in this case probably charge their card immediately for what work has been done. And if you're like really close to finishing up the property, just finish it up. You have it contracted, they've accepted it. Any accepted estimates from a living person will be treated as that contract to finalization once they're dead, unless they have specifically stated so. In, like large contracts, construction projects, you actually delineate what happens if you die. But in this case, like if they've signed a contract and they have promised to pay, you can finish the work, charge their card immediately. If you have a bunch of questions or whether or not there's going to be money in the card, then maybe you do something differently. But it sounds like you're pretty close to this property being done. I'd wrap it up, charge the card and move on. And it doesn't sound like it's a recurring customer I'd contact the the family though, or put a note on the door, like an envelope saying sorry for your loss and then basically just saying like, we are happy to maintain the property and it's likely gonna have to go up for sale. So like someone's got to take care of the property up until that point. So it stinks. We had some crazy stuff happen at the Bellingham shop. Very similar. Not death, but some weird customer interactions the past few days. Mr. Anonymous.

There'S a long one. Okay, you've spoken recently about selling more locations and pushing for that. What are the bottlenecks or obstacles to that? From the past, my impression was.

Was Command Center's ability to support more was the bottleneck. Do you feel things need to keep improving to get more franchisees or are they improved? Okay, these are a lot of questions. Okay. Do you feel things need to keep improving to get more franchisees, or are the improvements and changes due to trying to separate ourselves from the competition? Great question. So here's the thing.

Four years ago we sold locations at Augusta Lawn Care. Those members pay $1200 per month. Four years later from that time, they still pay $1200 per month. And yet we have probably 4 to 5x the amount of support, the amount of infrastructure, the amount of value add, the amount of vendor relationships, etc. And so the.

The goal is that as we keep the price the same twelve hundred dollars per month, the the value just gets continues higher and higher. And like Tuesday I'll be announcing another thing that we're doing for everyone.

And it'll have like meaningful dollar amount value for all of Augusta Nation. And so my goal is just to make it where it's like when you run the math, it's like, oh, it will cost me fifteen hundred dollars per month if I don't, if I'm not in Augusta, oh, I should probably join. Makes a lot of sense. And people join like masterminds and workshops and stuff like that. And they pay thousands of dollars a month just for the community. And so like the community's gotten way better over the past few years. Like for the first 10 or 20 owners in the side Augusta Nation, they remember like we didn't have masterminds and like maybe one or two posts a day on Facebook. And then I would update everyone usually every other week via email. Like new things that were happening.

There's much more lively discussion in Facebook. Everyone now has WhatsApp groups that they're in. As long as you've been to a conference, usually get into several WhatsApp groups, some community. We have multiple meetups. We now have the program where we actually give you money to make meetups in your local area and get owners together. And so.

Do you feel in terms of improvement, like, I'm just like, I know that, like, just the way I'm built, like, we will never stop improving. Like, the number one thing in my mind right now outside of Copilot, and that, that one, I know it will get back on track. It's just a matter of like, getting a lot of these kinks out, and then we will get back on track of. Of the features being created. But more importantly, it's figuring out the winter. The all the pressure on this industry and all on August Nation is the winter. So that's like my preoccupation for the next six to eight months is like, how do we make sure we nail winter? I don't think I'll be able to do it this winter. I'm going to have definitely some things I want to test and I will give out as.

Frameworks to use for this coming winter, testing that, and then I want to eventually just nail it.

So those are like the. Some of the major improvements right now. And then in terms of separating ourselves from the competition, like, the number one reason we need more locations is to drive all of our customer acquisition costs down. We can keep running ads until we're blue in the face. And I'm running ads right now trying to figure out a bunch of stuff, which, by the way, see a random ad in your area for Augusta Lawn Care, and it's pointing to your website and you didn't run the ad. I am running ads that I'm paying for. No one else is paying for it. That might drive traffic to your site. It's not gonna be a lot. I'm testing a gazillion things, though, and I need a whole bunch of data. And so I'm literally probably running ads at probably 100 plus locations. I'm doing it at Bellingham too. But, like, I need more data. So anyways, that's a side note. Second thing is though.

Is we can run ads to are blue in the face. That's not necessarily a great moat because ad platforms change, iOS platforms change, algorithms change people, other people figure out what works on ads, et cetera. What people can't duplicate is brand. And having a thousand locations will dramatically decrease all of our customer acquisition cost. And so I've always been like a much more of a perfectionist. Anything negative that comes in my brain gets way more attention than it should. And so because of that, when you have 150 owners, there are always, there's always someone struggling, there's always someone really, really having a hard time. And as much as one side of me, like the part of me that wanted to go to medical school and help the person that is broken and the person that is, is needing help is like, that might not be the best thing. For the other 149 people that need us to grow, the locations count, so their brand awareness is increased and their customer acquiring cost gets massively demolished. And so I need to be more confident in the fact that we have not changed the dollar amount per month ever for being part of Augusta Nation. The value in being part of Augusta Nation has increased on like a lot of different levels. And so we need to go into, let's get more locations because this will ultimately bring down the customer acquisition cost and that will ultimately be the moat that no one really can replicate. People will eventually figure out what we did with Instant Quotes. People eventually figure out the AI thing. They just will. They will not be able to replicate a thousand locations. And so all the things that we're doing is facilitating that. So, okay, now let's keep moving on here. Many of us bought into a model that worked, seemed to for my view, and was far ahead of the competition. I'm wondering if these decisions are to make Command center work because the model didn't work or if there's any reason or a combination model. The model. The model.

I'm wondering if these issues are to make Command center work.

No, Command Center. Command center has to be able to scale.

With new locations. That's in part why to your point, previously we never really have pushed growth of new locations is because Command center can't take on 500 new locations tomorrow. Like even if that happened. And so.

All the stuff that's being done this spring rush, though, to prevent any sort of backlog, estimates are going out. Every call is answered. Those are the bottlenecks in the past. I couldn't say confidently, like I made the post on Facebook this morning. Like I looked at last April to April for that and April for that. And like every single, like our response, lead response time at Command center, the amount of phone calls we were missing, like all of that stuff versus this year. And it's like it's night and day. It is literally night and day. And there's definitely something to be said in terms of having to train so many new people this spring. I know we've all felt the effects of that Somewhat. But that is something we can solve for. That's something that we can refine and make better. And every single year at commencement, they make improvements. And the improvements, whether it be technology or departmental wise or just making sure that the phone gets picked up and making sure that estimates get sent out quickly. Like anyone that has been here for more than a year and a half knows that in spring rushes, we would come in on Monday and have thousands of estimates to get to. And sometimes your estimates from Friday evening might not get to the customer until Tuesday evening because, like, the weekend would just pelt us, like, demolish us. Well, with Max being able to take all the calls, we never miss one with the.

Sunday hours. We don't come into Monday with being thousands behind now. So, like, there's just a lot of positives that allow it to then remove that as a bottleneck. And then like next year. I know already know they have so many things that they want to improve. And a lot of it revolves around making sure that when we hire that many people, like, they get more reps, there's better training. So they're doing even training stuff today, like recorded calls. What's. Like, you do not let someone sit for 10 seconds while you're trying to find something. You need to keep talking to them. All these little things, those keep getting better at. But. But like when we are literally losing team members at command center like we have in previous spring rushes, because there's so much stress and anxiety around being so far behind for all of you, like, we can't. That's not sustainable to keep adding locations. Competition. Competition is still far behind us. So chasing advancement feels like a friction point for me as an owner and pulls me back into the business more and more. I'm. I've never. I'm never sure what will be the plan a year from now, because things aren't actually figured out. They are tests. They are test. They are test runs. Okay. I would have to know exactly what you're kind of pointing to because you're saying everything, which is a pretty. Oh, just things. Because things. If I could define what things are, that would be important. The only way, like, if we spent an entire year locked down on one thing, like, we just wouldn't be able to make much progress. And so this year, there's been several new things. Instant quotes. That's new, Max. AI for spring rush. That's new.

And if we spent an entire year waiting on one thing to be changed, there's not a lot that we would get done. And if you look back at like if you went to the Facebook group Facebook page or even with the emails I send out of all the updates, like if we just waited a year or a year and a half or two years for every single thing, we would not make any progress.

And so like we're going to roll out something next week again, it's going to be optional. The same thing with like Max is optional the same way that instant price forms are optional. So these things you can slow down, you don't have to be part of the cutting edge of it. That's totally fine. But there's just no way that we get ahead of this industry that's sleeping and has been for decades without pushing the envelope on a lot of these technical, technical things.

And it's kind of like I've always been pretty clear about that, that being the case and that's like the vision of what we're doing. And if you don't want to, that's fine. There are people that are opted out of Max AI totally fine. There are people that are opted out of instant price forms because they want to do all the in person estimates. Totally fine. These are things that.

Take time to develop and actually mature into a real moat. But a moat doesn't just happen overnight. It will take time and effort and things merging and putting, being put together to actually create a irreplaceable moat and something that is truly.

No one else can replicate. And.

I think a lot more of this will become more obvious by the end of this year because there's so many things that we are currently like 80 on and it'll converge.

And I like every single week we are slightly improving Max. Every single time we are improving instant quote forms. The speed at which they deliver new system that we come out of next week I'll share at the roundtable will dramatically help all of us.

All these little things together when they converge. And like now copilot starts talking to Max and Max can talk to copilot and the instant quote form can talk to Copilot. Pull the instant, pull the price into like all of these things together. Like one of them isn't going to do anything. Like it's like a three, three fold core is not easily broken. Each of those three chords by themselves not a huge deal. But you weave them together, become way stronger. And so I do believe that by in this year a lot of it will become much more obvious because like in so many of these areas we're like at 80% whether it be Max, whether it be.

Co pilot stuff. The instant pricing, like instant pricing has been working great, but we can't get the stinking credit cards connected. It would be a huge lift. It would slow the sites down dramatically. We have to get. Put every site through PCI compliance. One rogue location doing something stupid with their credit card could really mess up the entire system. There's a bunch of different reasons, but when we get all that figured out.

It'Ll be, it'll be cool. All right, if we.

If we know a few businesses that could help out other franchises, can we shout them out on the Facebook group or do we have to go to you first? Why would you have to go through me? If it's going to help someone, please, by all means, share.

Wait, who is this? One second, let me just go into Facebook.

Marcus. Yeah, just share 100. I don't know why you have to go through us. The property clip got completed. I'm asking more for. For the mowing aspect. Oh, okay.

For the mowing aspect. Yeah, I would. Oh, I see what you're saying.

I would probably mow at one time as kind of a condolences for the family and say, hey, we are happy to continue this on a weekly or bi weekly basis. Here's the pricing. I'd probably do a letter in their front porch. It will get picked up probably within the next couple days with the contact information, etc. You might even want to put a note on there saying like, hey, when you call the office, make sure you let them know that we put this letter on your front porch, et cetera. You could do that or even just give me your personal number.

Because a lot of times people, when they're going through that with a death and dying stuff like it's tough, like emotionally, so feel free. But that's what I would do. Probably just give them one for free, given the pricing to continue. What are other industries that you would say are sleeping?

Do you. Man, home services are just brutal.

To be perfectly honest, I can't say with authority because I'm not in these other industries every single day 24 7. And when I look at home services, there's just so much room for improvement.

And disruption because nothing has changed in a very, very long time. And so.

It'S probably only my, my only good answer. Like every industry is ripe for disruption and there's bigger, there's really big industries like real estate, for example. Right. But there are, there's so much money there and there's so much bureaucracy. It's very difficult to get things moved as like there's a recent bill that just got passed around seller commissions. It's getting all held up in courts and all their whole nine yards. Like it's a very bureaucratic, bureaucratic industry and there's a big bunch of big players with a lot of money that are, it's being poured into it. So I look at home services just like man, when robotics come along in 20 years like it, it'll simply go to the companies that figured out the software that makes that, that hardware. The robotics work well.

So landing here in Tallahassee, Florida which I the other day just found out Tallahassee, Florida is the capital. Florida. We were, we were going through there. I'm like, this is the capital. Anyways, what would you think to test next in Facebook? Google and door hangers are not producing really any results. Just want another thing to test and figure out what works.

Okay, so if you're trying to do paid ads then you are probably going to be relegated to things like nextdoor Angie's List. So for example, you could do Angie's list. See if the leads come in, you don't have to pay the annual fee. Just make sure you go through the deals form on, on the dashboard. You try those if you want non paid. I think a video tomorrow I'm coming out with is like eight ways to get leads for free without spending money. One of them could be like doing holding a sign next to the road. It could be door knocking. Like door hangers might not be working. What happens when you do door hangers and you knock on the door? I've seen people say that door hangers don't work. They have a hundred left and say okay, these next, the last hundred go knock on the door when you put the door hanger up and talk to the customer and they've got three customers. I'm not saying it's going to happen. I'm just saying.

There are so many different ways to like test all these different ways, these things.

What happens when you do door hangers with pricing that's very low. What happens when you do the property cleanup? Door hangers versus the mowing door hangers. Your Facebook ads, are they the standard ones or is it you in a local environment? Like saying I've tested Facebook ads. Like which ones? And again Landon, I'm not, I'm not begging you. I'm just saying like I'm just trying to give.

Test your thinking so you get different ideas. Have you done videos with you in a local part of town on a job site? Pictures, video have you done long CTAs with like lots of text and like all the positive benefits and like how much they're saving? Have you done short CTAs like call now. That's it. We're testing a bunch of this stuff right now with Copilot the franchise. And then I'm eventually gonna start rolling out kind of like a nationwide Facebook campaign for just general lawn care leads. And that is like, sometimes I will change the seat, the text, same picture, same button, everything's the same. I'll take it from a long form text with a whole bunch of things in it and like save this. Like, here's this offer a P.S. and all this garbage. I'll switch it to something stupid like mowing services and I'll just launch it and it'll crush. Right now our best performing ad for people joining USA Nation is a text says Augusta long hair franchise and that's it. So I just test a whole bunch. Shave. I feel attacked. Shave.

Look, you don't have to shave to be clean cut. You have to look presentable. It's one thing to have a beard that's like all over the place. It's a different thing to have it looking good. Dj, I would try to zoom into your picture here. It looks very clean, very clean. I. I feel like that definitely passes the test. If I could, hey, if I could get a beard and get it to look like nice and trim, I'd do in a heartbeat. Mine would be patchy and all over the place and then I'd really be talking, would be talking my own music. So no, I mean, shave is like clean cut, a good well cut beard, like really clear cut lines looks really good. So one day I'll achieve that greatness. Until then, I'll just default defer all comments about beards to Kevin Fairburn. Speaking of which, Kevin Fairfield, feel free to post in the Facebook group. I will be putting a link on the dashboard in relation to the Memphis meetup which is happening just a couple months. All right, everyone, thank you so much again. Last reminder, Tuesday, 4:00pm Pacific Time, 7:00pm Eastern Standard Time. I will send a zoom link via text and email on Tuesday to get into that private room on Tuesday evening. All right, everyone, take care of.