Mike Minutes Mastermind 04/19/2023

Hey everyone, I'm a little early this morning. Let me go and kick things off.

Let me put this into the YouTube.

Cool. A couple quick things I wanted to go over and then we'll go into questions.

In the playlist. Copy this, save that, put this into here. Boom. Couple quite a few questions actually came in on that post I made the other day about the AI call. So I'll give a little more info on that I'm working on there.

And a couple other things. Okay, cool. I got that into Facebook. Cool.

First AI stuff because everyone was wondering about that.

We are in talks with a couple companies. The one that I'm most in depth with right now is called Poly AI. If you're busy with your spring rush, don't worry about this. Just I'll do all this stuff. Don't worry about it. But if you are really interested, you can come take a look at it. You can see this is the part that we have to work with them and that is like figuring out words and what they mean in terms of code. Because honestly you have to remember these, these robots don't actually hear and understand things. They got to be typed back to code and integers and things like that. So that's the part that has to be customized so you can take a look at it. Watch a video too if you like. It's very human, like voice assistance.

And so that will just get better I think in time. But I've compared the reason I like these guys, they have the most believable robotic sounds. There's a lot of other companies that actually do a better job I feel like with the AI, but they're. It sounds like a robot and it's very apparent. This is the part that I'm working with them on is trying to get the one time customization fee down to a point where I feel like we could recoup that cost within a year, year and a half. Because if it goes to where we're trying to eat that over the course of two or three years the technology is going to be so fast that.

It'Ll be, will be paying, it will never recoup our like the cost. So I'm just trying to make sure that's doable for us at Command center. I think it'll cost us around 200 grand.

So I'll keep you guys updated. Someone had asked about how I came up with the math of like 6 to 10, 6 to 10% increase in leads. And basically what I did is I looked at we still just because we're closed On Sundays and nights, basically the other 12 hours of the day, we miss about 20 to 25% of calls simply because we're just closed. And so when you look at the amount of people that leave voice messages.

When a phone is call is missed, it's usually around 20, 25%.

Of people, or even less will, will leave a voicemail. They'll just hang up. And so when you take that number and you calculate about 40 to 50% of those calls are typically leads.

In contrary to support, billing, scheduling, related things, et cetera. That's where I kind of come up with that, that math. I know it's a wide range, but I'm just kind of guessing six.

Is what we would increase because we don't call back people who call us at 1 o' clock and hung up. Right. We don't call them back. Now, are they usually not a customer? Yes. And that's also where it's like, well that could be the leads because someone who is a customer, billing, scheduling, etc. They're going to leave a voice message typically. So until we actually do it, we don't really know the impact. So it could be 3 or 4%, but based on the math, I think it's 6 to 10% of leads that are just left on the table because we simply don't answer our phone 12 hours out of the day. So it would also help us a lot at Command center because Sunday's coming in from it being closed currently it is a three day job to get through that backlog of Saturday, Sunday. So that would help us a lot at Command Center. Yeah, I'm just trying to, I'm trying to work with them in terms of the initial cost because I know, I know in three years this will be almost commonplace for the general contractor and because they'll bring the technology down to the point where you can customize it yourself, etc. But our hope is that we can stay ahead of that, pay that initial mark part and then we as franchisees, we just get billed that same amount per minute when the AI is on the phone. And I think we could recoup that cost within a year, year and a half. If it goes beyond a year and a half, I'm kind of, it's just not worth it. So hope that makes sense. Feel free to look at it if you want. That's kind of how I came up to the math on that one though. Couple other things.

There is this, this is what spring rush feels like. If you are your first or second spring rush Especially your second spring rush. That's typically when we see the most burnout. Because your first year, you're governing the flow of leads due to the fact that you're marketing for every single customer that second one. Now you have some brand recognition. Now you have more lead flow people coming in because they've seen your trucks, word of mouth is flowing, et cetera. And so you start to feel behind. So even this morning, I think there's two people have already called in two franchisees that are just beat. And I know what it feels like to be there on the side of the road crying. So don't feel alone. Please reach out. And then asterisks next to that. Don't think I'm looking over your shoulder and be like, oh, they're missing estimates. They. They're, they're. They're messing things up. They're having to push jobs off and making the brand look bad. And therefore, I'm gonna, like, close your location down. That's not how I look at it. I would only do that if you're not staying engaged and trying. I cannot blame you or fault you if you're trying your best. You're trying to find employees, you're doing your best to make sure you manage the lead flow. You're getting to customers as soon as you can. If you can't, you're letting command center know. So they canceled the. The estimates. You know, put the banner on your front page that says, we're just not taking in person estimates. There's three banners inside of the dashboard that you can put on right on underneath your estimate request form that tells customers that you're not doing certain services or that you're not taking work at all or you're not taking certain types of estimates. So please do use those if needs be. And do not feel like we are looking over your shoulder in spite. We are looking over your shoulder in support. So even this morning, I know there's been a couple already that Lee and Liz are jumping on based upon feedback from command center. So please reach out if you need help. That's what we're here for. And don't feel alone. That's why you're part of augustination. So, yeah, all right, Jump into questions.

Oh, and the other thing that the AI thing will kind of help us with too, is spikes in call volume. Especially this past couple weeks when service off hut we're waiting for the infinite scroll. It's very difficult because we can't pick up the phone during that time because if we do it breaks whatever we were doing, and then that task never gets done and becomes a yellow slip. So, like, it's been very frustrating. A lot of rebooting and things like that, and hopefully they fix that. But.

In seeing all of that, what we've seen is, like, you might have 10 minutes where there's not a phone call, and then all of a sudden, there's 50. And so what AI would help us do is instead of having someone wait on the phone for 15 seconds, it's like, okay, after a certain level, can we have the AI at least answer it, take their information, and then pass it along to the correct person just to make it a better customer experience? So things like that would be very helpful in the future, especially as those spike spikes. Instead of 50 calls in 10 minutes, it goes to two or 300, because that's how it works. It's not like we have a very linear call volume. They can come in batches, and then that drops on command center very quickly, and everyone's basically on the phone, and then all of a sudden, that's not there. So the AI could help with that down the road too. So we're kind of thinking forward, and I think that would help us with our workload management down the road as well, but just very, very expensive right now because all. All these AI companies are working with, like, the company we're working with is, like, literally, they're. They're onboarding the Golden Nugget right now and all the casinos in Las Vegas. And, like, the salesperson I'm working with, it moved to Las Vegas to get all the casinos on board. It's like they're working with companies that are spending billions of dollars. They won't even talk to anyone if, like, we're the smallest fish in their pond. So you're basically begging and asking, and I'm trying to sell them on the vision of the company, how much we can grow down the road to hopefully be able to accommodate, like, the fact they'll work with us. So, anyways. All right, let's jump into.

Kyle's Harvin. For your profit location, do you completely turn off advertising and just codes with word of mouth and one clicks? Yes. Assuming that they are booked out more than a week and they're in profit mode, they're not gonna do any marketing. The only time we do marketing is, like, if they're, like, especially, like, in the summer, if they have a bunch of team members that are really, really good and they don't want to fire anyone. Like, there's no low performers. That's when I jump in and say, okay, we will market because the goal is to keep the team busy. But ultimately typically what happens is they get to the summer, it's like, okay, like let's get rid of these couple of lower performers that we wanted to get rid of all spring rush but we couldn't because we were busy. That's typically what happens. But in the case that someone had a bunch of go getters, I would, I would feed the machine just to keep them busy and hitting P4P in during the summer. Devin from Red Deer. I'm starting out and I'm getting busy. I have 25 spring cleanups and think I need an employee. What's your thoughts on working Monday through Sunday? Well, you can work as much as you want. You just might want to rethink that with an employee because they're not going to do that. So you know, just monitor. I had to have a, I did a video with command center last night about the same thing. There's people working 50, 60 hours a week. It's like, look, we appreciate that, keep doing that please. We really need it. However, it's like also make sure you don't push yourself to the point where now you need a whole week off because you push too far, right? So I would say the same thing, like self regulate, safe, self monitor. And if you don't have the skills yet to do that, you need to have a significant other. You need somebody else to be able to say, hey, look, you're too tired, like you need to take a break. And a break might be an hour break. It might not be like, oh, you need the week off. It might mean like, hey, like let's not get three more mows done. Let's just wait. Those can be pushed off till tomorrow. So if you haven't done business for five plus years, I do believe you're going to have deficiencies in self monitoring. And, and so I would just try to try to find somebody, whether that be even if it's an employee but like ideally someone that you live with outside of the business that can be like, hey, like you are, you know, you're overdoing it, right? So I'm, I'm still not really great at self monitoring. I this very lucky thing that I have and that is I get cold sores as soon as I'm, I know I've pushed the line too much. So sometimes it'll happen like when I don't actually feel like I need to slow down or I need to stop working. But if I get a cold sore like now I know that that means I'm like two days away from like breaking. So I got a cold sore last Friday. So it's like, okay, like we're gonna, I'm gonna sleep tonight. Right. So you just gotta. I'm very fortunate in that regard. And figuring out what happens, like what are the triggers for you that you start seeing warning signs. It might be like you start forgetting things. I think, hey, look like yes, we could laugh that off and say we're busy or b be like, okay, that's a warning sign of me going too far. And if I keep doing that for a couple days, I'm going to start being saying dumb things to my employees, saying dumb things to my spouse. And that leads to a whole other issue. Right. So it compounds because you're unable to self regulate and so.

Ideally if you can talk to someone that kind of keeps a pulse on you, that's ideal. Or if you, if you, as time goes on you'll get better and better at self doing it. Um, but yeah, I don't know why we got in that topic but Nick, from the peen. I know you mentioned the past that the weather plays a huge factor in how every door direct mail mailers work. I've got 15,000 ready to go for treatment packages. Most people are settling with their treatment provide before May 1st.

I feel, I already feel like I am a little late sending them. The weather is not looking the best for the next week. Wondering if I'm overthinking the weather or if it's better to get them out there. Treatments start about May 1.

The weather is not looking good with every door direct mail. It is huge is. It is an understated massive variable. I would probably wait or you know what I would probably do, Nick, if you're doing multiple to one neighbor like to one area, just do the first one now. If you're doing one like 15,000 completely different addresses, I would maybe just start filtering them in and I would recommend this actually regardless. And then don't do 15,000 at one time. I would probably do like start now and just finish.