Mike Minutes Mastermind 04/18/2024

And we're live. Hello, everybody. Hope you're doing amazing. I was sitting here waiting for the text messages to go out because it usually takes about 10 minutes for everyone to get it and realized I had not sent the text message out. Fantastic. Very good. Okay, so sorry. So I'm gonna be getting it a little bit later.

Speaking of which, Connor, you should be getting it now. I did add you in a different copilot account, so you should get your text engine now. Connor. H. All right, I'll make sure this is set up. Very good. All right, paste this into Facebook.

And we're live.

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There'S a question say here. Okay. All right. Well, I posted this morning to see if anyone wanted to add some questions if they had never asked questions before. So we have six. So let's see if some of these are new. All right. I don't think I have any announcements specifically that most of those out at the roundtable on Tuesday, again, if you haven't watched is on the dash. It is on the dashboard. It was emailed to you and it was texted to you, so. And it's on the Facebook group. So definitely check those out, get some updates and let's get this thing started. How many? Six of them today.

We're live. Okay.

This is from location 1000 from the future. Okay. I appreciate that. I am a student of the Andean School of Economics. Following your example has made a tremendous impact in my life. Think instead of thanking you, I will be that same great leader for my team and give them the same opportunity that I was given to attain financial freedom. Despite the short term criticism around GoPilot, the change you wished to make an industry as well underway. And it's about to get exponential. How lucky are we to be part of history? Stay hard. We got your back. Thank you very much. Look at these people trying to make me cry on a mastermind. That's just not fair. Thank you to whoever that was. I have changed my opinion on compliments. I will take them all. I will take every single one. I will appreciate every single one. The ratio to non nice things is. It's pretty high. So thank you. I appreciate it. David van Brink from St. Matthews, Kentucky. I don't know if I've ever had. David. This might be a newbie, folks. All right, here we go. Max metrics close ratio question. When a client sends in a picture of a door hanger to accept service, what is the best workflow to get them on the schedule? Should I create an estimate, either have them or myself accept it? And then schedule from the accepted estimate. Yes please. So I recommend you if they send a picture, they're accepting it. Create the estimate market as accepted and rock and roll. That way you can create an automation around the fact that it can automatically go collect their credit card information.

So I would recommend that you could also make a tag. If you really get automations you create a tag. So that way if you put like accepted door hanger it modifies the automation email to them to really revolve around like thank you for accepting your estimate via door. Here we got the picture and you're on the schedule. Like you could modify it slightly if you wanted to, but at least just have an automation that's trying to pick up people that don't have a car on file.

Or should I skip creating an estimate and create a new visit from the scratch? The main reason I'm asking is because how this affects my estimate close ratio for maximum I create and accept an estimate. This increases my close ratio. Whereas creating a visit from scratch doesn't affect the close ratio. Yeah, so I would, I would want it to affect your close ratio. It's an accepted job, right? So that's why instant price and instant price forms in general increase your close ratio because you don't even hear from the people that don't want the job. Like you don't hear from them, they're not going to accept it. They're not going to send the picture of a door hanger and reject the quote. So it does increase your close ratio. And this is why at across the guest that even though number of leads are down our our close ratio is slightly higher as a blended average than last year even though our leads are less but we have a higher close ratio and there's pros and cons to that One, you don't get the person that submits a picture of a door hanger that they're declining so you don't ever get their information. That's the downside. That person might have asked for an estimate in the past. However if they asked for an estimate in the past you would have gone through estimate process or done OTP and had to burn that admin time at command center. You going out and visiting the customer only for them to say no anyways. And so there's kind of a, it's a double edged sword. But in general if they're going to say no to an instant price form, they're probably going to say no to your price anyways. So by having the instant price form or having the Instant door hanger price on there. You weed out people that were wasting your time anyways, I will increase your close ratio and I would recommend making it part of to get a full picture of the business.

There was a legitimate estimate given and there was a legitimate acceptance of that estimate and you can expect your Covid ratio to go up slightly if you are doing that.

Dustin From Champaign Sorry miss, even if you look at the.

Top 10 close ratios instead of Augusta this year versus last year it's like about 15% higher and it's not because we're closing more deals, we actually have less leads. The fact of the matter is with instant price forms and instant quote door hangers that everyone's using now, you're going to have an elevated number.

Dustin from Champagne Sorry I missed the opportunity in the roundtable to ask my question the other day my phone was dying. Dustin, there's thing called a battery and you plug it in. I'm just joking.

My question was asked was here let's try this again. My question was do you attribute the quicker response time to max AI or to the extra CC reps higher in the spring? I'm sure both have impacted this number but was moved the needle more. I would say both.

Because max AI instead of it being a voicemail and we have to contact the customer and most of the time when it's someone who's a voicemail and we have to contact them back like say from the weekend, there's only about 38% of people leave a voice message.

But let's assume they leave a voice message. In the past we would be coming in Monday morning we'd be calling them. Most of the time we never got them on the phone. And so then you're like they're caught in this limbo loop of just trying to contact them to get the estimate.

So now at least max and capture that information. Now Monday morning they're getting a quote inside their inbox.

So I, I would say it's like 50, 50 probably actually more on the fact that extra CC reps have been hired. Liz got a blank check and she fully utilized it to make sure that we were staffed up correctly.

I just knew going into this year that leads were going to be lower. The economy's not going to be good and we just need to do everything we possibly can to make sure we're not waiting a day or a day and a half. And the reason in the past that kind of got fresh on the table was because there were so many leads coming in. Everyone was drowning it's like, whether or not the lead gets on my schedule in two hours or 24 hours, I don't really care. Like, I'm just booked. Well, I knew this year that was not going to happen. And everyone's kind of felt the dampering of leads coming in. So we need to make sure every single lead, we were like, right on top of it. And it's been reflected in the close ratio. Again, there's so many variables, so it's hard to, like, directly say it's one or the other. But I know for a fact that answering the phone and getting back to customers faster will get us more work and increase our close ratio. So we'll just continue to do those basics.

Vlad from Winter Garden. Well, we have four questions here. Oh, let's see here. Can you go over the 4L framework and tangible actions to improve each category, please? How can I improve my current state of liquidity? How can I improve my current state of lead flow? How can I improve my current state of labor issues? How can I improve my current skill set and leadership? All right, instead of me going through a diatribe of 20 minutes, give me one second.

I'm going to give you a link that will walk you through all of this.

Let's see if I can't find this.

If I can't, I will get it to you eventually.

Okay? On Facebook, Vlad, I will put a commented video.

I'll make a commented video that walks through all this.

Just it just like for me to do a good job of answering this will take me 25 minutes. So instead, I will send you the video that walks you through all these. And it kind of gives you two different ways to fix each of these. One fast, one slow. Fast being with having more money. Slow being, you don't have as much money and like four to five for each of those. So I will send you the video. I will put it in the comments of the Facebook post For this.

Mike Mint's mastermind, Mr. Anonymous.

Just open location. I only have two recurring mowing jobs and a couple cleanups on the schedule. A local animal shelter asking for bids to maintain two properties for them that they use for animals and one that they use to house and feed the homeless. Would it make sense to provide basic mowing services in exchange for advertising? They give shoutouts on their Facebook page for people that donate services. And I was thinking about working out a deal for shoutouts and possibly having the right to perhaps sign to the three locations. Does this make sense? Maybe you have a super steep discount all two locations would come up to $5,400 a season together if I was to bill it. Animal shelter is high volume, so there could be a good return.

Animal shelters are usually good because you're gonna have a higher.

Quality person typically in there. In terms of like, okay, let's just think there's two ways of looking at this. One, are we doing this for charity? Are we doing this to make money? Let's just be really honest about that. Like, I'm gonna do both. Oh, I try to figure out which one. Do you weigh this more? Are you 60% making money and 40% you want to do something good for people? Because you need to make that decision first, in my opinion. Because once you make that decision, then the answer becomes clear. If you're trying to maximize the exposure to the community and make more money, that's when I'd be really pushing for the signs. Or I'd give one free cleanup away in exchange for the posts online that they're going to give you and then try to get them on a recurring services ongoing so you can keep your cash flow healthy. If you're getting started, I understand, like, just give everything away. They're going to post about you at the beginning and then in six months forget about you because you just become part of what they do all the time. So I would probably go, if I was trying to maximize my exposure, I would probably say, hey, I'll give a free cleanup. You guys make a post about me. Thank you very much. And then here's the price for the ongoing maintenance. Second thing I would be doing is if you want the recurring maintenance for free, I just want to put a sign out on property. That's probably how I would tackle it. Hopefully that sparked a little bit of an idea. And if you're just trying to give away services because you support these causes, that's a very different matter. That is a matter of like, you do this out of the goodness of your heart and if they shout you out, fantastic, but you don't really care. That's different scenarios.

Ken Lynn would, would, would like your feedback on this thought I've had. Would there ever be a Gust app where people could download it from the App Store and order service? A vendor side and a customer side. If you're a vendor, you could pick up the extra jobs the franchisees do not want.

Or if it is out of their service area. I figured this would also increase the reach and scope for the Augusta brand and maybe even encourage some solo operators out there to be a Franchisee instead of just subcontract pros and cons. I don't really want to do this.

This is the model that they use at Jim's Mowing. And it is.

I don't like it. I don't know how else to say it. The cost of doing this is prohibitive to the point where I don't feel good about charging the amount that I would have to charge for that lead.

Yeah. And we really don't get a ton of.

Of leads that are way outside of people's service areas. We really like. We really don't. We really have nailed making sure we don't rank in certain areas that are far away from someone's service area. We get a lot of people like 2, 3 miles outside your service area. I'm not going to give that to your competition. I'm just not going to do that. Like, even if they give me money, I don't want to be doing that. So I don't ever foresee this happening. I would much rather, if there's ever, like a service arm of the business that we need to create, I would much rather create. I don't know if I'm putting energy into something as generating leads for Augusta and making kind of a Google local services for Augusta. That sounds interesting to me, but it's not worth the time energy, honestly. And then you get people that are mad. People like the dispute. Like, can you imagine having to work with the disputes from Google local services?

Google doesn't care because they have a monopoly. But, like, for me, I'm not going to like people saying all sort of horrible things about me because I did. I declined their dispute about some lead that I gave them. So.

You didn't want to build a serum. You're right. You're right, Ken. However.

Building the CRM in the long term will help Augusta. Me. Selling leads to competitors of Augusta is only helping me.

And the phone calls coming in that are outside of the service area, guess who's paying for them? Owners of Augusta. So either a, I have to figure out like a whole, like, okay, I will give the money back to owners and that help bring down their command center fee. And then I get the other part, the amount of work that goes into that. Like, we're just building out. We literally. And the thing is, when people call Augusta, they're. They're expecting a certain service quality. Like, they're expecting a different level of professionalism. And for me to be like, yes, we will give you off to someone else. I don't really. I Can't control it. I cannot control what that experience of the customer is going to be. For Augusta, we can. And if someone's acting out of order, we kick them out.

So personally I wouldn't feel good about handing customers off to contractors unless they're massively vetted. And by creating that whole system around vetting them, you create much more operational drag. Cost goes up, and now I'd be like inclined to tell them just go advertise themselves.

So I think there are better ways for me to help the industry than just giving them leads. Because the vast majority of people think they need more leads to improve their business. And the vast majority of times it is not more leads that they need, it's other issues inside their business that need to be solved. Like they don't need more leads, they need to follow up on the leads they currently have. I need more leads. Okay, your close ratio is 35%. If we follow up on the current estimates we currently have the current leads that we do have, can we make that 60%? If so, we can almost double the business. So I just generally believe leads is a band aid and that's why so many people right now are feeling it so bad with the economy. We've never seen as many businesses close as we have this year for long care web design. Like people just going out of business because their lead just got cut in half. And if you always believe that leads are the solution, all of a sudden the leads are gone and you have no way to upsell. You have no way. You don't have one click estimates established. You don't have an actual.

System in place to keep recurring revenue coming in. You're going to go out of business. And so I actually believe that sometimes leads are a band aid to a bigger problem. It's like you're gushing blood because you have massive churn and you have very little recurring revenue and you have no way to upsell customers. Let's throw the band aid of more leads. Yeah, work in the short term. That's the past four years everyone's been floating along just okay because there's so much money in the system and leads are pouring through everyone's nose. And when that changes, all of a sudden it exposes the fact that you're bleeding to death because you have no follow up system. You have a horrible close ratio. You, you don't do follow up calls. And when I say you, I just mean broadly business owners in general. This includes myself.

So that would be my 2 cents on that.

Like literally, if it doesn't. Like, if it's not gonna help Augusta, I'm just not interested.

So, like, showcase reviews make a lot of sense. We need it for Augusta. I need to sell it to three to 400 people to make sure we pay the bills and can keep a developer to on it, and I'm happy. Same thing as P4P. But ultimately, it's like, I know we need it for Augusta, therefore, we will build it. All right, I love you all very much. I hope you have a fantastic Thursday, and I'll see you tomorrow. Take care.