Mike Minutes Mastermind 04/15/2024

And we're live.

All right, let's see here.

Get this party started.

1, 2, 2, 2, 2, two.

All right, now we're in business.

Okay, everyone, a great weekend. Happy Monday.

Let's get started. Quick announcement. Tomorrow evening, Tuesday, April 16, 4pm Pacific Standard Time, 7pm Eastern Standard Time, will be the round table. I'll be sending out the zoom link tomorrow afternoon via text and email for everyone to get access to it. Probably 20 minutes. I have a bit of a presentation and then.

You know, open up for Q and A. So a couple announcements that will be going through, updates in terms of data and also some, some new things we're unveiling, so should be really good.

All right, questions? Well, we got nine marathon Mondays in business.

Here.

Okay, Ken Lynn, how does the get together thing work? Did I hear something about money or was I half asleep? Guess. You talk about the Memphis meetup. There is a tab I created on the home page of the dashboard has all the details on there. I think it's 40 bucks a person.

Trust me, you don't make a single penny on live events. So that is on the homepage with all the information. They're doing like a pressure washing thing. They're doing the actual keynote stuff. They're doing dinners. So check it out. Always a nice time to kind of connect after spring rush and a lot of fun. Like two and a half months, Two, two months from now. Ken, nickname. How does the nickname thing work? Coach Connor and Hutch have their nickname. I want it just grow. It grows on you, you know. All right. Speaking of it, Coach Connor, I asked command to send a customer and set up a poop automation for a customer. They said that automation should not work at that at the moment. We also get a yell slip because dispatch service reminder is not triggering for customers receive an email about unlocking their back gate. So their crew not happy about picking up their dog poop, thinking that automation or email them and the customers ignoring us. Same as back gates. It's starting to cause some issues. I'm not sure what workaround we do at the moment. I think it'd be near impossible to do it manually because I have to go into individual account and read their conversation with command, see if they have dogs. Why is automation not a thing? It's because it's based upon the dispatched. We don't have that yet. And that is where.

There'S not a status of dispatched. So in the past, if you surface autopilot, when we change this to service to dispatched, that change is what would trigger the Automation So we don't have a status called dispatched. What we are going to do in the future though is have it where you can bulk add tags from the dispatch board. So you could just quickly bulk tag people.

That way you could say okay, every time I just dispatch people I'm just going to select them all and tag them as dispatched and then that could trigger things off to resolve that.

Basically there's not a dispatched thing right now what you could do as a workaround. I know some people have done it where just it's just the day before the event so they're going to get the day before it's on the schedule and you could do that. Just know that you, if you move that job around they would have already got the email or the message saying that they.

Are going to be getting that done. Same thing is true though if you, if you use the dispatch thing, if you move a job off, some people are still going to not have it on that same day. But I would say that.

The way that this is going to get resolved is when we allow for bulk adding of tags from the dispatch board. So what you can do is you can just bulk people really quickly and then have all sorts of automations built around whenever you want it to be dispatched. For example.

Kyler from Plainfield, Indiana can veteran owned business be added to my website? Also veteran owned company online marketing material. You can add it the any sort of veteran owned stuff on your market material. That's totally fine. You're just gonna have to do it on using the Photoshop files or the Canva files and design it yourself.

Landon Smith from Tallahassee, Florida Hey Mike, I think on Friday you said that you were coming out with a video on 8 Ways to get new customers without money. Has that come out yet? If so, where can I find it? Thanks. I think it comes out tomorrow on the Blue, the Home service Millionaire channel. It's like very basic stuff we talk a lot about and that is everything from.

Actually I think I could probably read it off to you. Maybe I can't because.

It'S actually. It was actually from a Facebook group. A Facebook.

Comment I made on one of the owners that was basically saying they didn't have enough any more money. And I listed like eight different ways and it was like knock on doors, Facebook, local Facebook groups, contact call every single one of your existing customers. And I just like listed off eight different ways. So I think it's tomorrow or the next day that I'll come out.

On the second channel. H from North Carolina can you help clarify on the $4 trainer bonus? This is only adjustment to PVP and not base pay. Correct? You could really do this either way, Connor. You could do it where it is just on their P4P which means that if they're not efficient enough it goes bye bye. Or you could do it to their payroll bonus. It really is up to you.

From a morale perspective, sometimes better to tie it to their payroll bonus so they get the money no matter what.

And then we just take it away if they get yellow slips. So you say. I prefer to hire for culture rather than hiring just for experience. However, this means we bring on some very green team members that need a true full full two weeks of training. The first few days can be extremely slow. We have some team members that can average very high 20s but while training these two new team members they're brought down close to or at the 18 per hour base pay. Part of by the way, I think we're at $6 now per hour for trainer bonus. Just FYI part of working here is just taking one for the team and building helping build your new team members. But how can we help Our experienced team members that are training now have almost a $10 swing in hourly pay. 40p 4p is an idea but not all our lawns are overgrown and I don't want to compress margins for just a month's worth of training. Yeah. So I would probably if I was you in this case I'd probably lock in their trainer bonus to payroll bonus instead of P4P only and then I would we I think we're at $6 per hour now for our trainer bonus for the specific reason as the guys make more money on average, you just want to make sure that they're not being de incentivized to be trainer. So we've added extra bonuses around the trainee doing well afterwards etc to make it more appealing for them. Landon Smith to Tallahassee floor. Do we have a mowing shaker board or no? I think there's only one or two on there. I don't know if there's a mowing one. I think there's only a property cleanup one on the.

Pro shop. They are super slow right now. We've been harassing out getting our the door, the QR code for the business cards up there. We've been doing that for three weeks now. So they're just really slow. So sorry about that.

Funny one. Do you ever foresee a time where somebody would go to Amazon to order lawn service? Kind of like a Subcontracting type of thing. Yeah, you can actually already do this. Amazon has this. Everyone thought it was gonna be take over the world when it came out like five, six years ago. They've ruled it out alongside. When you can like get your.

TV installed, your washer and dryer installed, when you buy things, all of those require contractors. So they kind of set up something similar and it kind of fizzled out and. But for a while there you could order lawn service from Amazon. I don't know if you can now or not, but for a while there you could and it was, you know, any recurring service like this is gonna be very difficult for any sort of brand to roll up because it requires constant attention. It's not like a one time setup, like a one time TV setup, one time washer, dryer set up. That makes a lot of sense for them to contract out. But when you talk about coming to someone's property every single week, when you're talking about things that are weather dependent, they just, it's just impossible for them to have any sort of brand continuity. And there's just way too much flack for them because they can't tailor the service at all. They have no control. They're subcontracting it out.

Landon Smith from Tallahassee, Florida. Two questions on EDDM and marketing timing. In my area.

Here in Florida, grass has started growing and definitely needs to get cut, but it picks up big time this summer and that's our busiest time looking to do EDDM to grow quicker. But I have done door hangers without any return so far, which gives me a little skepticism to pump more money to the marketing funnel, what would you think would be the right time to run the EDDM sell out on door hangers? In a climate like here, where mowing really picks up in the summer, about May or June, but it's still needed in March, April, May. Okay. So in terms of timing, I would definitely not pour a whole bunch on EDDM thinking that it's going to, you know, crush. Do it a little bit at first, otherwise you could potentially be setting yourself up for a lot of disappointment.

And the second thing I would say is like in a market like yours, the time to market is this entire period of time. Like if you're trying to grow, it doesn't matter if it's May, June, when it's really, really picks up, versus March, April, May, where people are still mowing their grass. And like you said, it definitely needs cut. So it just comes down to if you have time, I would be Marketing. If you have money, I would be marketing. If there is demand for services, I would be marketing.

I don't think this is a matter of like, like if you ask when should you spend the edit the put the edit door direct mail campaign out in general, thinking that one, one touch point is ever going to fix the problem is usually a flawed concept. In general, like okay, I'm gonna like put all my eggs in this basket and like hope that this one time thing works. That's why every door direct mail, typically people are disappointed by because they're like making up one massive push that's very expensive instead of realizing that like people usually need six to eight touches just to get any sort of.

Buying decision. So I just be careful with that notion. But I think in terms of timing, you know, obviously it's going to have the highest return when demand is highest. And so if you want to wait till then, fine. I would argue that spreading that out over the course of the next couple months in a more centralized area might be the better move. 2. When doing the EDDM, have we typically found a better return in casting a large net or hitting smaller areas multiple times? For example, I want to spend about $5,000 in every door direct mail. Should that hit the same person two to three times or should I just bulk send it to a big area?

I have.

Stories that could prove both ways in terms of the small area versus large area. I typically like to have a smaller area because I am going to have better route density. I'm going to, people are going to see me a lot more often in that area. It's cheaper on every door direct mail per time so I can test it out. I'm not putting all my eggs in one basket. I can put it over the course of like three or four. So generally I'm a fan of that. Keep in mind if you're going after mowing, even though it gets busier in terms of the fast of the growth of the grass by June, most people have already chosen their service provider by that time. So I ran into this like when I was in North Carolina and I showed up in June when the grass started taking off. Great. Except it would kind of been growing March, April, May and because of that people had mostly already gotten their provider. So just make sure your marketing material point to the fact of like going, getting people to switch versus like tired of not having time on your weekends to mow your grass. Because if they, if they have that problem, they've already solved it. So the only reason they'd be coming to your service if they're switching from another provider. So just keep that in mind. When it comes to marketing in general is like ask yourself, all right, is this marketing piece going after someone who's never had a lawn service, or is this going after someone who currently has a lawn service and is switching? Because those are the only two type of customers there are someone who is always done themselves and never hire a professional or two, someone who's hired a professional and switching services. You start boiling it down to those two things. You gotta ask yourself on every marketing piece, which of those two demographics am I appealing to? If you're talking about saving time, saving, you know, allowing them to be able to do other things and all the rest of it, you are appealing to someone who has never had a lawn service. If you're talking about answering the phone 24 7, if you're talking about instant pricing, if you're talking about the ability to have credit card on file and not put a check underneath their front mat, all of that is going after people who are switching service providers. So being clear in that can be helpful sometimes in how you do your marketing. And the timing of the year is important because if you're doing advertising two to three months into mowing season for mowing, every single customer that comes to you is likely going to be someone switching from another provider. So whereas at the very beginning of spring rush, if you're just getting started, if you just started mowing this week, your, your marketing would probably be best inclined to go after the people who are new because you're gonna get that wave of people at the very beginning of the year because they don't want to get their mower started, get them hooked in now, and then be running more campaigns towards the people who are switching as time. As the spring rush continues.

Would it be a good idea for CC to text date of service having lots of people saying they never receive schedule email, thinking spam? A lot of people don't open up emails in general.

You could, if you wanted to set up a text message to do day of service, that'd be totally fine. We're not gonna have CC do it in addition to on top of everything else for now at least. But you could definitely do that if you would like.

Trying to think how you could do this more automated. You could just, you could set up a thing where a new customer. I'm just trying to think and see. You could do it based on service type. So if it's certain type of items and service and it gets scheduled, you could send a text message out.

And it has. Is it. Would it have the date that was put on the schedule? You could probably automate this to some degree. Honestly.

Is it legal for another company to use the name Augusta Lawn Care? Not for marketing and advertising. If they're using the trademark.

And then if they have a. Their. If their name existed before we started, they get locality. So if they have like a county or a city, they register their name prior to us than they do. It's really. If someone starts to use the dog, if someone starts to use our fonts, if their website looks too close. Usually if I send them an email, they usually back off pretty quick. I'm pretty nice about it. And we've never had to actually sue anyone. But if you ever have any concern with this, send me an email franchise gustaloncaservices.com and if we need to, we can get lawyers involved in if needs be. We haven't had to ever. Usually I'm just pretty nice, like, hey, I don't want to take this any further. We own the trademark. Here it is. It's been done like six times where people have challenged it and it gets got passed. So please, if you would be so kind, take these three or four things off your site. Most people are pretty compliant and I send those directly for myself to try to get compliance prior to going the legal route. So if you're concerned about someone doing that, send me an email and we'll take care of it. All right, everyone, hope you have a fantastic Monday. Make sure tomorrow on the round table we get things rolling again, 4:00pm Pacific Standard Time. And I will send the zoom link out tomorrow after noon. All right, everyone, talk soon. Bye. Do you want to.