Mike Minutes Mastermind 04/17/2024

And we're live.

All right, let me drop this into.

Facebook real quick.

Some quick announcements. I sent a text email out. It's in the Facebook group, the mass. The round table from last night. The recording is up and available.

So feel free to view that. I apologize. I was going to send everyone a text message right before because I know everyone's busy and I totally forgot. So I apologize. A lot less people than usual. So sorry about that. Other announcements. Nick is on the war path. Let's go. As our owner, success manager. So he's really going to be adding some really good stuff. He's going to be talking with the coaches and really, like, one of the things that he had talked about the leadership team is like, having a predictable result and pattern for every call of, like, what you should expect as an owner when you get off the call, what each of the coaches can expect and like a rubric for them to follow. It's really tough, honestly, as a coach, if people don't have questions, like, have some sort of, like, logical path to follow. So we talked about a really good kind of framework for that so that when you get a call, you know how it should start, what should it contain and how it should end. And obviously, if you want to talk about other stuff after that, fantastic, go for it. But it'd just be much more systematized. So they are working on that and I think it'll be really positive. Okay. There'll be updates on that in the future. They're working on it already.

Let's see what we got for questions.

Seven questions, baby.

Bring this one up here.

Okay, let's make sure you're.

Sorry. Is this viewable? Yes. Okay. All right, first question is from Kyle Tarvin. How much do you typically raise milling prices when you switch from growth mode to profit mode? I was talking with him in the franchisee and I'm talk thinking of offering a stupid low entry price to gain another 60 customers the next 22 months, then raising prices 10 to 15 per service once we hit capacity. Just don't want to undo all the hard work of gaining those customers just to lose them on the back. And when we raise prices, our standard mode should be priced at 40 to 50 per week. I was thinking of offering a low price of $30 per week just to get our foot in the door. Is there ever a price too low in growth mode? I wouldn't say it's too low. Again, it's not a matter like if you think in two months you're going to be hitting capacity.

Here. One second, one second.

So if you're gaining customers and you're in spring rush, you're going to hit capacity. Regardless of whether or not you hit raise prices now or you've raised prices in two months. The question is, when will you hit capacity? Right? And so this is, this is what I would challenge you on. If you aren't even certain that you're, you must have a ton of excess capacity for the fact that you're gonna like slash prices and for two whole months, you know, you're not gonna hit capacity because what you wanted to be doing, thinking about more is like, how quickly will you get to capacity and be able to raise prices? Otherwise this tells me is that you have a lot of trucks or a lot of like, you have a lot of excess capacity because you're just like, I'm just gonna throw a whole bunch of, you know, people into the bucket and then hope that when I raise prices, some of them don't leave. How we want to be thinking about it is I want to get to capacity as quickly as possible. If I need to raise lower prices in the short term to do that, great. But it's when I hit capacity, I will raise prices. And then in terms of how much to raise prices or how, how much do you typically raise prices when you're at capacity? You raise prices because you cannot do more work and you raise prices until you lose customers. And so be careful with the idea that I'm going to slash prices by 30 or 40%, going to take two months to get there, I'm going to lose money on all those jobs and then I'm going to raise prices then. Because in two months you're going to be towards the end of the spring rush and.

You might not have as much. Like if you're not at capacity and then you're, you're doing lower price jobs now you're really shooting yourself in the foot. So I would really probably actually first look at can you reduce your capacity? Like, can you sell a truck or two? Like, do you have that much capacity excess? And if you're like, no, no, it's only like 20 or 30 jobs, well, will you reach that anyways over the next six weeks by keeping your prices the same and you'll be able to be profitable in the jobs as you get them. And by the time you hit two months, you'll be at capacity anyways at the higher prices. So why go through the pain of having to even do a price increase if you're going to get to capacity in 2 months anyways, simply doing it slower and doing it a more profitable way. So yeah, profit mode is not a matter of your pricing. Profit mode is are you at capacity and what do you do at capacity? And so there's two ways to get capacity really fast. One, reduce capacity, I. E. Sell a truck. Or two. Or two. And you let an employee go. Or two, you can increase capacity. Sorry, I said there was two ways to decrease capacity. One is reducing the trucks and the employees. And.

In terms of reducing your capacity, you're only going to do that if you have so much excess you want to be able to bring it down so you hit capacity sooner because it's when you hit capacity you raise prices. So I hope that helps a little bit. I just, I just don't know if the logic pans out that if you're going to lower prices for two months, I have a feeling that if you waited, you know, three months, you'd probably fill your schedule anyways with the higher prices price jobs just because you're in the. You're going in the spring rush.

Colby from Daphne, Alabama.

What are the best digital marketing methods to hyper target down to individual neighborhoods? The answer, this used to be next door and then they really diluted their product because they don't do neighborhoods anymore. There are two distinct areas with about 1500 home each I'd like to target. I am sending out every door direct mail to these areas. I'm also putting out door their hangers, but they are highly frowned upon here. I only hit the neighbor same neighborhood once, maybe twice a year. All the cities in my area have ordinance specifically defining door hangers as solicitation. I'm not particularly in the mood to fight city hall at the moment. I don't want to push my luck putting them out too frequently and being stopped completely. Okay, so this is the first question. So if you have 1500 homes, it is going to cost you about.

550, $500 to get something in front of all of them via every door direct mail. So if you literally wanted to, you're like laser like focused, you could do like a four or five.

Mailing campaign to these 1500 homes and probably hit them all like four or five times for a few thousand bucks. So if that's like really what you're trying to do and you're not going to do door hangers, you're not willing to do yard signs, you're not going to knock on doors, another thing you can do is Facebook ads. And then in your when you run the height, the, the radius, put exclude and then put them closer around so it literally be a very, very hyper area. Sometimes you just don't get enough traffic because there's only so many people in those 1500 homes on Facebook every day. So keep that in mind. The other thing I could potentially do is next door just realize that you can usually only do it by zip codes. So as long as like those 1500 like make up a bulk of a zip code, if it's really small, you might be. That might be able to work too.

Question number two.

We were unable to complete a moan service because the client had other contractors working on the property. The crew skipped the service and noted why. I reopened the service, added notes and changed the service description to dispatch fee and completed. Interesting. Okay. I did it this way so the service was easily tracked back to the appropriate day and the customer could see what the charge was on the invoice. I also emailed the customer that we were unable to mow and the lawn and why they did not check their email. Oh no, this is going to be bad. The problem arose when the customer called CC to complain we hadn't mowed their lawn. CC saw the completed service and told them we completed the service on the scheduled date. What's the best way to skip a service but also add a dispatch fee? Great question. I would probably say just go straight to the invoice, add the fee. So that way it's like we can see the job was skipped. There's a note that says it was skipped. And then when we go to the invoice, it'd be like you got charged because you didn't notify us 24 hours before. And we have the explain what the dispatch fee is so you reduce the likelihood the customer actually even calling command center. So that way when they get charged, they would see it there, they wouldn't have to go into the visit. Like they're not going to do that. I would personally do that because like on the invoice it's going to have a dollar amount. I just make sure that in. What did it say here? I did this in the service, I reopened the service and I added a dispatch fee and completed.

Also emailed the customer that we were unable to mow. Got it.

Yeah. So I would probably put on whatever they're looking at, like in the invoice, be more descriptive of what the dispatch fee is. Right. So if you just went in there, change the dispatch fee, put it as 15 bucks or whatever you, you wanted to change it to, you're gonna get a lot of people calling. Like they people are just anything like that. They just call. I would probably make a dispatch fee, a actual item and service. I would make a very detailed description of the inside the notes of what a dispatch fee is to prevent even the call from to command center because command center is going to look in there and be looking for a service. And they saw the service because you went in there. Just changed it. And it's part of the same recurring series. Like all you do is change one event inside the recurring series. It doesn't look like a different thing. I would probably make it a different thing to keep it really, really straightforward. Like, I'd add a separate item in.

Mr. Anonymous. How do you stay humble and avoid drinking your own Kool Aid, especially when things are going well?

Well, if things were going well to be a good question to ask when things are not going well, there's no Kool Aid to drink.

Okay, let me try be more.

I don't know. We all have like, we all have levels of pride. There's all these things that we're trying to like, fight down. I hate people that are proud in general. So like, if you ever want to like, critique, criticize me, just say I'm proud. And like, that's probably the thing that is my Achilles heel in terms of like hearing it. So like, I try to do my best not to appear so because I hate pride. Like with like, it's like it just turns me off so much when people are proud. Like, it just, just kills me. And I, and I, and I. And I see sometimes I'll say certain things. I'm like, sick. That was a bit of an ego that said that. And I hate that. Like, I just hate that. I just wish I could replay so many things, especially at conference. I'll say something like sick. That could be taken like a proud or like arrogant. And I just hate that. Like I, I don't like in other people. And I hate it when I, I say stuff like that. So sometimes it's difficult because like, as you become success, more and more successful, like just stating facts can very easily be taken as bragging or.

You know, drinking your own Kool Aid. The thing is too, like everyone says comparison is the thief of joy. Um, really it comes down to whether or not you judge from that comparison. So like, if I compare to someone that's better than me, all of a sudden it makes me very humble. And so sometimes it's a good frame. It's like, yeah, you're successful. In this, you know, 1.001% of the world that knows who you are. There's a big world out there. There's a lot of really successful people. Like you're not that special. There's other people that went to college young, there's other people that have bigger businesses than you. Like just chill out. You're a human being and you make mistakes and those are pretty glaring to me. And so that, that'll probably help. And, and honestly because I've, I'm pretty pro growth. You constantly are breaking things and you're constantly making mistakes. Like if you. If a lot of times the people I see as proud are the ones that are in very high cash flow businesses such as education, products, marketing.

Some elements of software, but usually not because software's so hard. People get humility and just building the product.

Those are the ones where I typically see people getting a little bit more high on their own supply. So I don't know, I don't have a tactic but like yeah, like a conference when everyone's like woohoo Mike, I want to take pictures and you feel like a celebrity for three days. I'm very aware the other 365, 362 days of the year. I'm a garbage collector and I hear about every bad thing possible and I know all the areas and weaknesses in the business and I keep those forefront of mine and just stay focused on those. So I think in the long run it'll lead to better results anyways for the business and.

I would like to see more of those type of people. So hopefully if I have any level of influence, I just try to emulate what I'd like to see around me. Okay. Kyle's Harmon is there a worker on a copilot to be able to view a snapshot of revenue scheduled per month. Looking at the rev report tab, I think it shows trying to show both our active and canceled knowings but I only want to see what's active for the month.

Listen, a snapshot of revenue scheduled per month. Okay. The fastest way to do this is going to be through the dispatch board. Once we have where you can just select the entire dispatch board, do filters and look at the, the bottom of total revenue. And so that'll be coming.

That's one series after probably later in the summer. That's going to be probably the easiest way to do that. And then you can filter out however you want what's on the dispatch board.

Kyle Freeze from Bloomington, Illinois based on this idea, show me your Inner circle, and I will show you your values. Wow. We have all sorts of cool questions today.

Okay. Based on this idea, show me your inner circle, and I will show you your values. What are the top priority values that you think people should infer about you from your inner circle, both Augusta and non Augusta? Deeper dive. Do you think these currently align with what you want to be your top values? Oh, Mercy. Okay.

The people closest to me are the people in the leadership team.

Because I work as a big part of my life. And.

So that's why, like, when people inside the relationship team showed values that were not aligned with what Augusta's about, like, it was not a very hard decision within a matter of a few seconds to make critical moves.

What's the top priority values that you think people should infer about you from your inner circle, both Augusta and non Augusta? Okay. Anyone that's in my inner circle, I personally want them to be wanting to become better. I want them with a healthy amount of.

I would call it paranoia, but, like, they want to improve. They want to become better. And they're not complacent. They're content, but they're not complacent. I hate complacency.

I want people that can move quickly.

Those are some of the values, like, to me personally.

Yeah. Deeper dive. Do you think these currently align with what you want to be our top value, to be your top values? Yeah. I don't think about this stuff a lot, to be perfectly honest. I think about, does this person make you better? Does being around this person make the people that I love? It doesn't make them better. Cause sometimes I will put up with people I necessarily don't like, but because they help the people around me, I will put up with them.

Like vendors or something like that. Like, if I know Augusta can be helped, I will put up with someone that has rubbing me the wrong way or doesn't necessarily share my values. I could care less. I just want to see other people that I love do better. And so I'm willing to compromise on what I feel is right in the moment in terms of.

Well, I enjoy being around. But then there's certain, like, lines that, like, you're just not going to cross. So, yeah, all these personal questions. Mercy. All right, Coach Connor, in terms of reviews and getting reviews on platforms outside of Google, does this truly help the overall ranking of your business? Here's Yelp, Facebook, bbb. I see these. Honestly, mostly people who review in these places are the Karens because they want to out you on blast. They Go everywhere. We have 100 plus Google reviews. However, the other platforms like Facebook, Yelp, BBB, we have one to five each on these platforms. At what point should we get getting reviews on other platforms to help to help out better weight our site and brand organically? Great question. In my opinion, the hundred plus people you have reviews from, those are the ones I want to be able to get all the other reviews from because once they've left a guru view, they're kind of done.

But they're your best customers. They're the ones that already have proven based upon their actions that they are willing to leave a review for you. So I would really like if they left me a Google review to also get a home Advisor review, a Yelp review, a Facebook review. And that's what is always like. That's the reason Showcase reviews has all the different connections and even like very some very niche home review platform sites that are only like certain states that because once I've gotten a Google review from someone, it screams to me that they're willing to give me a review. So guess what I'm going to do next time I'm going to send them another review request for a different platform.

So Google is still the 7700 pound gorilla, but if I can get 20 or 30% more value from the same person that left a Google review, I'm all on board with that.

Corey from the Bellingham shop, I'm curious about outbound calls to clients. You mentioned on the roundtable that this feature was not available. Is this for legal reasons or do you want to be added to CC features down the road? Yeah, you can't record outbound calls, inbound calls, as long as you announce it to the customer that's being recorded, you're good. But outbound is, is much more regulated and so certain states have certain, certain things. But it's not even a matter of like we can turn it on or not. It's that Ring Central doesn't allow it. So and it's again they, it's because they're wrapped up in all the legal side. So it's not even an option that we can enforce or do. And if we could I would because I've seen the value of at least recording the inbound ones. The fortunate part is usually mad customers. It's inbound customer, it's inbound. And so we get the recording of people like disputing invoices or saying we weren't there. Things like that.

Kevin with a shameless plug. Let's go. Nick Reed is added to the presentation lineup for the Augusta workshop, Saturday, June 29th at Memphis, Tennessee. Let's go.

If you mark a property skip doesn't generate invoice, you would have to have the crew market skipped, then go to that customer's account and manually make the invoice not ideal. Second, let's see who this is.

Okay, Ryan, if you mark it probably skip doesn't generate correct. You would have to have to have the crew market skip, then go to the customer's account and manually make the invoice not deal correct. That's what you would have to do now. Or you could make it where as a visit and complete the visit. So if you're like, hey, the dispatch it wasn't.

Done. You could also just like add the visit. You could complete it and that that visit name is the dispatch fee. So.

I just feel like if we allow skipped visits to be added invoices, we're gonna have a whole other can of worms. The fix that we talked about yesterday is going to address this in in part. And that is like how uncompleting a visit what that does to the invoice. And that's why like this whole double charge thing has been happening when you complete the visit twice. But then also when you want to take a job out from being complete, edit it and put it back in. So some of this will be addressed inside of that. And then after that, if you're like, hey, there's. There could be a better way. We could do some sort of a feature request.

Cool. All right, I hope you all have a fantastic rest of your Wednesday. You haven't had a chance. Watch the recording. The roundtable. I think I already saw like a ton of people watched it, so. Very good. And we will see you all tomorrow. Take care.