Mike Minutes Mastermind 04/22/2024

Hello, everyone. Hope you're doing good. Welcome to the 4M, the Monday Mike's minutes Mastermind. Let's go. Let me get this up and running here. Okay. There's not going to be anything on the Facebook group. The reason for that is because Facebook changed their algorithm last Friday and no longer are they allowing streaming to groups. So we have a bit of a problem. I will figure it out. A lot of people are pretty mad, so maybe they'll change their mind, but they usually don't. So I think right now what I'll have to do is I'll have to post the YouTube link to the Facebook group. Once I'm done recording, I'll figure out a better strategy down the road. I'll just pin the playlist for YouTube at the top, but we'll figure it out. For now, most of you get text messages and we'll have to do it to YouTube anyways. So.

That'Ll be the strategy for now because I don't know why they did that and I'm gonna have to figure out several other things I use that for. So anyways, let's go ahead and jump in.

The problem is if I put on Facebook now, you won't be able to live questions on Facebook at all. So again, maybe they'll change their mind on this, but for now, it's gonna be YouTube only and you'll have to get the text messages or watch the recording afterwards. All right, Will and George from Australia, let's go. The Land Down Under Mike. Nick Reed offended our country greatly when he laughed at us and called our existence random. In the roundtable, will there be a yellow slipped fishing to him or possibly a demotion? Oh, man. Absolutely. We would also accept a public apology. Oh, man. I love it. People with humor. I love it. Aussies are good at that. They're very good. Dry humor. All right, Dan from Lexington. I was just listening to the Green Grind and they're talking about marketing. One thing they were talking about was geotagging all your jobs. You are when you are there so that Google knows that. That you do work in that area. So it will help market to those areas. Is this something that Copilot does or will do in the future? Seems like a really good idea for trying to get route density. They recommended the app nearby. Now to do this costs anywhere from 155 to $500 per month. I think this is the same app I was looking at a couple weeks ago. One second nearby. Now I. Because I know the. The people who originally founded this company Let me see here.

What's the quick check ins every time you serve a customer? Oh, here, Wednesday, just hear this. Okay, so this is check ins. This is kind of similar to what used to be Foursquare by the way.

Lead sms.

Quick check ins every time you serve a customer. Give you local search value for every city and neighborhood your customers come from. Keyword value for everything you do in a relevant media, photo or video rankings. Honestly here, one second.

I just don't know if this is going to do as much as just simply like posting consistently to your Google listing page and then like on your Google listing. I'm just trying to figure out what they're trying, what they're posting, how it works.

I'm guessing what they're doing.

Reviews. Great Google reviews. Customer views at 40% clip prove to prospects you're delighted, people near them building a better and better overall reputation. All check ins, photos, videos and reviews boost your Google Maps placement.

So really what you're trying to do is get people to check in like your team to do it.

I just don't know why you need this software. Like it really, it seems like this is more of a review site and then what they're doing is they're making it where your, your employees check in at every single job.

I just, I would just think that Google has figured out that like this is coming from certain IP addresses. Like if it's the same employee client talking, you know, in every single job. Do I think this will help you? Yes. I also think that.

You posting great Google reviews will probably outweigh your check ins.

But hey, I think you could probably do this without the software by having your team or even if you're a solo operator, just check in every time you go to a customer's property. You could do that. I just think that it's a very hacky way that Google has probably thought about in terms of your employees or you just driving around your service area and checking in a gazillion times. It doesn't seem to me that they would weight that heavily on SEO as much as reviews. So I have a feeling the nearby now thing like the check ins is one aspect of what was a heavier weight in SEO, which is your reviews. But from a geotagging perspective a check in or two probably doesn't hurt. So even if I was you, I'd just go to your Google page and start checking in on your estimates jobs. But like remember, anytime you can hack something like that, Google patches this stuff so quickly in terms of if it's actually heavily weighted on SEO because you could just drive around your city just checking in and like, taking pictures of random houses. So.

I would say that, but I am not opposed to it. Give it a shot. Let me know how it goes. I would love to learn and see if that helps, but I do think the reviews are really the. The weight that Google is looking for because that shows like a real user behind that versus you or an employee checking in inside of your service area, if they haven't already. I would imagine they've figured out like one IP address, one device constantly checking in to the same account. It doesn't hold weight. I'm just gonna guess though, so. But I'm not opposed to it. Let's go. Anytime you give data to Google, they like you. So if you can give them reviews, pictures, videos, check ins all for it.

Hutch from Charlotte. What is it? Oh, by the way, Connor, you changed your YouTube.

Subs your YouTube channel name. I thought that was a good move. What is the average monthly revenue produced per Command center app? Oh, man, not enough. Let me see. Figure this out. Oh, that's tough. You're asking for, like, the whole system. Ooh, mercy. Let me guess, though. I know it would be for, like, us, like, at Command Center. It's too low. I just know that for a fact. But if I actually take like, the system wide sales. Give me one second.

It's coming, it's coming, it's coming.

Okay. And then divide that by how many reps.

Yeah, so this is going to be inflated because there is about.

5 to 10% of Augusta that takes care of most of their own stuff.

And so don't compare. The reason I'm saying this is like, don't compare this to if you're going to get an office person because this number is inflated. But this is probably about the number that you're looking for.

Again, just take it with a grain of salt because some people do take their own calls and.

We don't do everything for everybody. So the likelihood of you being able to get.

One person that is doing an office, like an office assistant to $600,000, not super, super likely. Usually it's more around 500,000. That's what I've seen. Usually you need about a.

Thousand hours of office help per $500,000 in annual revenue. That's like a very blended average that I've seen. Service type changes, changes massively. What type of services you have, how seasonal you are, etc. But like, when I did, when we were at the Bellingham shop. We needed three people in the office when we hit 1.5 million.

And that was like crazy. During the spring, for three months, they were working overtime, things like that. So.

In terms of revenue that we make at Command center, per. It's too low. One second. I can do that math too. Roughly. It's probably like $4,500, $4,500, I'd say we make per rep. Because there's like a lot of their time is training. A lot of their time is, especially the frontline team is waiting for the phone to ring. Like we have to, just people waiting there, sitting, ready to go. And then they'll be maxed out, and then all of a sudden it'll flip. So it's just not as efficient. So. But the same thing is true if you have someone in the office, like, you're going to be looking around that $4,500 in terms of cost per person that you're paying in the office, right? So.

That'S why. That's why generally you're going to pay more for Command center during the spring rush compared to having an office person. But then during the other seven, eight months of the year, you. You'd pay. You'd pay less using Command center than if you had your own office staff. So the goal is to make it a variable expense and tie it like that way. And that's why I have Command center as an option.

Kevin from Bloomingdale, New Jersey, can CC set up project estimates only from existing mowing clients? All right, let me try to figure this out. Can Command center set up project estimates only from existing mowing clients? We're getting close to capacity. I want to make sure I service my current clients first.

Give me one second. What you could do. I think.

There'S a banner.

On the.

Website under the dashboard that you could put up that says, like, we're servicing existing customers only or not taking new customers on. So that's probably what I would do if I was you. If you're trying to basically block out any new customers and you're only servicing existing recurring or their projects, I would just put it on your website. Just don't forget to take it down. Like, once you get, like past spring rush, for example, and you need more customers. I saw it happen last year a couple times people forgot to take their banner down. And then I saw them in the Facebook group they're trying to market and everything. And I'm like, there's a banner on your website that says, we're not taking new customers. So I'd probably do that.

I would also say if you're getting close to capacity and you're going to start limiting leads, I would prefer you raise prices on existing customers so you can become more profitable and make a room for new customers. So I'm pretty harshly opposed to turning off leads in general like 75% of the time. There's always that 25% time. It makes sense because of the other context. But in general I would rather someone raise prices, lose some customers and make a room for higher profit margin new customers instead of just saying no new customers in general. Very generalized statement there.

That all the questions you had. Marathon. We have a 5m marathon Monday. Mike Minutes. Mastermind. Let's go.

All right, very cool.

I will announce this probably next week or the week after, but we are likely going to have John Taffer at Blue Collar Summit. We're finalizing everything this week. We are.

It's very, very expensive so we gotta get the money moved and all the other stuff. But I think it'll be a fun time and a good reward for our industry as a whole. Part of the, part of the conference is like um, I kind of, I don't like the fact that a lot of tech stuff and like industry stuff and info, business Mastermind type stuff. They get like all the really cool speakers and then like home service industries. We don't need to get any of the big names. And is there value in the big names? Probably not. There's lots of really, really good advice and information from people that aren't don't have big names. However, it's kind of nice to actually like see someone you've seen on TV and seeing someone you know is, is, is famous. It's kind of cool. So I want to add a little bit of that to the conference in addition to having some really good quality content. Carrot Smith. I'm looking at the Canva files in Google Drive and their different designs in the instant quote mowing door hangers from Pro Shop vistaprint. Am I looking at the right thing? Yes, Garrett, you are in Canva. We made it so that you can make changes. It is a completely different design. You can make whatever changes you would like to it and going forward we will try probably to use more Canva related stuff. But then we also want to make it really easy to check out Pro Shop so we kind of try to do both. But it's a different design completely and you can make changes however you want.

Thanks. Well, I was thinking 100k per month. So to clarify, 600k in annual revenue, trying to figure out a sustainable percentage of my payout of what is produced for the businesses. Okay, yeah, so you're right. In terms like what I gave about 600,000. That's a rough estimate, probably between 500,000, 700,000 for all of Augusta Nation. The caveat I'm putting on that is that we don't do everyone's. So it might be 10% inflated. I would say though, if you're looking to do your own internal office team, you're usually going to be getting a full time person for every $500,000 in revenue and revenue. And then you're going to save money compared to Command center during the spring and you're going to lose more money for outside of the spring rush, having your own office staff. I say lose money. I mean, it's just going to cost you more and then you've got to make the pros and cons of that. And as I've clearly outlined, usually once you start getting closer to a million, it makes sense to take a little bit of a loss, have some of those things handled internally and then offload things to Command center or this is the perfect scenario. This is the most perfect scenario is get someone that can work four or five months of the year and then hand stuff off to Command center during the slow season. That's actually the best way to do it because instead of paying someone four or five grand a month in payroll, if you can pay a thousand bucks for Command center, handle stuff during the slow season, then pay someone full time during spring rush, but save an extra couple grand a month because they're able to, they actually stay busy the entire time. That's kind of like the most optimal. It just really difficult usually to find an all star that can do all aspects of your admin and then they only want four to five months of the year. But it happens. Like there are people that want that type of work. We as owners always think we need full time. We need, you know, long term. There's a lot of people out there that are very happy with different schedules of work. So.

Hi Mike, how does your outreach to other home services feed? Mike's big why? Why market to other home services other than lawn care?

Several things. I think that the next leg of Augusta's growth is bringing in other home service industries. Every one of those industries struggle with the same exact problems we face in lawn care in terms of unprofessionalism, et cetera, et cetera. There's a couple industries that are really good H vac, very solid mostly because there's a huge amount of private equity behind it. And they are, there's a lot of, they're rolling up a bunch of stuff. Same thing with like garage doors, like Tommy Mellow for example, they're doing huge roll ups. Like they're just huge amounts of money being pumped into those industries. And so I don't think it'll ever happen that way to, to mowing and residential lawn care really.

And so I think that outside of that though, like painters, any sort of contractor, the same stereotypes in our industry apply and ultimately we're all selling labor also. It's just a matter of like there. I believe that all the home services are some of the hardest working people I know. And when I say hardest working I mean like physically willing to put themselves through pain in order to be able to succeed. And that's like not present in most industries. And that's why I feel like I want to help them. Like yes, I could make content about like everything we're doing with Copilot and like the software side. And um, I, I, I fall, I follow people that do software and I know like technically I could probably make better content and I have a bigger business than them from a software perspective. I just don't really care about helping tech founders. To be perfectly honest. Most of them have tons of money behind them from VCs or and private equity. And if they didn't, if their business doesn't work out, they go and get a $300,000 a year job doing coding. So like I'm not super passionate about them. I am very passionate about people that usually don't have a ton of education, don't come up from a ton of money, are willing to work really, really crazy hard and they have this 10 to 15 year goal of like being able to create a bunch of jobs in their local community. And it's like good, honest hard work. And they don't have a bunch of money behind them. They usually are scrappy. I like those people. And so anyone in that sphere, if they can identify with those things, I'm on board with them. And.

In terms of what industry will I target next, it's really just home services. I look at all of the labor industries as having most of the same problems. And so we ultimately take 20 to $30 per hour that we pay an employee and we, our whole business is built on how do we take that labor and convert it to pay to a customer paying $100, $150 per hour for that labor, that. That's all we do. Regardless if you're painting, regardless if you're installing trees, regardless of you are building a house, you are taking labor and you are selling it to a customer for a premium. And everything in the middle of systems professionalism, marketing, branding, all of that is what so many of us lack. And because of that, we don't have enough of a margin going from the 20 or 30 to, say, 70 or 80. We need to create better margin to be. And to do that, you need better systems, you need better. Way better technology. We're a good, solid 10 years behind.

We need. We need less dependence on physical labor. That's how technology would be helped a lot by robotics. So, like, there's a lot of stuff that we need to do. And they're like, painful obvious to me. And I think it'll help those owners tremendously. And like, for me.

I kind of did the medical thing, I kind of did the school thing. I kind of did. I do the tech side of things, and I do lawn care. I just happen to really like the people in lawn care and home services. People that, like, don't. They usually come from very little and they're willing to work crazy hard to try to make that different. And that's just who I identify with the most, to be perfectly honest. Nothing against anyone else not saying that if someone came for money or has technical background experience and has a backup plan that I have anything against them, I want them to succeed. Um, I just, I just identify or more with someone because I came from, like, the only way for me to get out of what my situation was was like, start mowing grass when I was 11, save up for college, get through college, and then just work crazy amounts of hours and identify with those people. So I try to help them. All right, I hope you all have a fantastic Monday, a fantastic week ahead. I'll see you tomorrow. Take care.