Mike Minutes Mastermind 04/22/2025

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to the Mike Mitts Mastermind. We got a bunch of announcements today, so hold on to your britches.

All right, first off, I'm gonna be presenting a bunch of screens, so give me a second here. Inside of the Augusta Nation Facebook group, there's this poll. Let me zoom in so you can see it better.

Okay. I need to adjust my screen size. Okay, this poll right here. Are you planning on purchasing a new truck next 12 months? If you have any remote chance that you're going to buy a new truck in the next 12 months, please press yes. Even if you think you're going to buy used, if you're going to get a truck of any sort, push yes. This is going to allow us to negotiate better with Ford and gm. We are a small fish in their pond of discounting and finance options, and the more we can prove to them that we have a larger amount, the better.

So this. This opens up the door for us to negotiate much better. So if there's a shot like. Like, for example, if I was like, should you buy new or used? And you're like, well, I don't have a lot of cash. I'm getting. I'm just getting started. I'm looking at, like, maybe a 15, $20,000 truck. Okay, if I could get financing really, really good for you for a new truck, would you rather do that? If I could get you, like, three grand down and $400 a month, maybe you would. So, yes. Okay. We need as many yeses as possible. So if you could just address that poll in the Facebook group, that would be fantastic. It helped Nick out tremendously on his negotiation of two different fronts, like I mentioned the other day, and that is the financing aspect and the purchasing aspects of the vendor agreements that we would have with these large brands.

We don't get a cut in this. Like, we. We just needed to be able to negotiate a better deal. And volume means a lot to these folks. And so if we can go to them and say, hey, we believe it's gonna be 100 or 200 trucks, we can just get better and better financing and then better and better discounts. So I have a feeling at our current size, we're not gonna a huge amount of discounts, but we're gonna get better financing terms and more extended warranties, and financing being like leases, apr. So your. Your rate. I don't know how much of a discount we're going to get. So, like, the more we can say that we're going to get for trucks and the basically say, hey look, if you did a great deal for us, we can get more trucks for you. When we go to them and negotiate we are able to potentially work on the purchasing side which is like hey, $1,000 off, $1,500 off? Is it $2,000 off? So please go fill in the chart or the poll next up it's likely going to be, if not end of this week, the week after. We will have available all the templates and designs and automations have been updated. There is over a hundred templates that have been updated, changed. Every single template has been modified, every single one. And so we will have videos on how you can do that yourself. And then like we talked about in the roundtable, you'll have till June 1st to do it yourself and we'll give you all the guides, the bundles, the, the walkthroughs, the videos, et cetera. And then if you don't do it by June 1st, Command center is going to do it for everyone. And so if you're very hesitant around automations, I would just let Command center do it because you don't want to mess this up. You do not want emails going the wrong places, text going the wrong places, not being notified about estimates being accepted, not being notified about call notes, et cetera. So we are wrapping up today a lot of the last templates and then we are going to create training around it so you can absolutely follow through it yourself. And like I said, if you want, if by June 1st you have not made the changes to your account, we will go ahead from Command Center's perspective and do everyone's and we will have an opt out, et cetera. So lots of training on that to come. Just know that the updated emails and text messages and automations are so much better, so much better. So I went through every single one a couple times and we've added emoticons, we've made it much, much simpler. We've ran it through AI to increase like just lots of different stuff in terms of ease of use, ease of reading, where your eyes go when you get the text message, the email, et cetera. Also the text messages going back to you as owners. Now there's going to be an emoticon for like an accepted estimate. It has a little money bag. If it's a call note you have a little call icon. So even if you're quickly just getting notifications you'd be able to see okay very quickly, oh, that is a call note right? Versus I might react to that differently if it's a work order change, for example. So we're using emoticons a lot. Designs have changed. Every single template's wording has completely changed. And so yeah, it's very, very good. Very good. I anticipate close ratios to go up dramatically simply because of the estimate.

Follow up automation being massively improved. So really looking forward to it. Last announcement of the day, Bit of a recap. I wanted to show it live.

Present share screen.

Why does this not. One second, I need to pull this up. There we go. There we go. Okay, this was presented on the roundtable, but I want to share it live here. This is on Trello. That is the Augusta design board. If you would like print marketing designs, go ahead and vote. There's a whole bunch of them in here. Already submitted ideas. You can see the ones that are in progress, the ones that have been submitted. These are the ones I voted on, but you can vote on these yourself. So again, just go to the dashboard and then you'll be able to go to the.

Gusta Media board. Well, I'm exactly where it is under resources gustafranchise.com.

I have to change this one. Oh, here, one second. I will show you how to get there, but first let me show you on this page how this works. So submitted ideas, they all fall under here. Then whatever's being worked on and what's completed from the design team. And so all you need to do is go in here like, oh, I like this one too. I will vote for that one. You can add your vote in right there. So you can also submit your request. If you have a brilliant idea for print marketing, submit your request. It's going to open up this form. Boom. You're going to open up this form, right? I can't show it to you. It's different app. It's a form. It's really easy. You put in the project name, job notes, your name, email attachments. It's fire. I would show it to you, but it's a different app so I have to go in and out of this whole thing. Okay, so that's that. Go vote. Because right now there's only like three or four people using this and there's not a lot of voting. So it helps the com. The design teams tremendously. I know the next week or two they already have stuff going on, but like then they'll be looking at this like which ones are voted up the most? So if you like these. Oh, someone just voted. Someone just voted. Oh, let's go. So yeah, getting here, you will have to create a free Trello account. But it was the cheapest way for us to do this without spending literally thousands of dollars. Like a lot of them were like, like $9 a user. Well, if you extrapolated that across 180 locations, we would be spending gobs of money on this. So instead of doing that, we did Trello. We have to pay some but not as much. And so it was definitely the most cost effective to have guests on this account. And that's why we did it this way. Okay, so you will see that if you go to.

Here, let's see, I pull this up and then I have to go back out to here. Man, they do not make this user friendly. Give me a second. Add to stage. Remove add stage.

Give me one second. We will get there, folks. We will get there. Share screen. Augusta dashboard. Boom. Okay, under here we're going to go down to resources and we're going to print. Design board.

Boom opens up a new tab looking all fresh and fine. This is where you can submit a new design request. If you click on project board boom it opens up just like we were looking at. Let's go. Okay, on that note, everything for announcements today. Let's jump into questions.

Questions. Present Share screen. See how many you got. Today.

We have six. Very good, very good. First officers from Thomas from Littleton. I want to clarify something from the roundtable meeting the other night. I believe you mentioned that all of our existing documents or templates in copilot might be edited. Can you confirm whether that means we will be removed unless we take specific action? Thanks for clarification. That is correct. What will happen is everything will be cleared out and everything new will be brought in and then reconnected. So think of it like redoing all the plumbing again, if you do not want that there will be an opt out, there will be education on how you can do it yourself.

But if you don't take opt out, then command center will come in on June 1st and redo everyone's templates. So you can opt out, you can do it yourself. And if you've made a bunch of customizations, I would recommend doing it yourself. If you're like, hey, I really like this one thing. I changed this, I tweaked this then great, go ahead, follow the training, download all the new stuff, reconnect it the way you want and you'll be good to go. But yeah, it's gonna like the new designs are so much better. Templates are so much better. The automations are so much better. The Design of every email is so much better. There's so much uniformity, better uniformity across the logos, across the width, across the fonts, across everything. I am in love with emoticons in the past 24 hours I will tell you that.

Next question from Jonesboro. Is there a way to remove the upsell feature from the website? Didn't see in the list of things to remove in the edit web page section. Let me see here. I had asked Tori about this the other day.

I forget what he had told me. Sorry, I was seeing from my notes.

I'm going to go out in a limit so you probably have to submit the instant pricing form and at the bottom of that I think is where the upsell feature is. So don't quote me on this because I'm not looking at it. But I believe when you fill out the instant pricing form on the back end of the dashboard that's where you actually choose your upsell thing. So you might want to just resubmit your form and then take that part out because that's where I think the option is. I will send this to Tori and say like see if there's a way to have this as like a remove from as a separate thing. But that's where my current answer is but, but don't hold me to it because I did not check on that. So.

Brian Connor from Augusta, Georgia if I want to add to the investment round, what should I do? Do I say sign the current safe. Great question Brian. So if you have not yet signed then you would just go ahead and email back Lindsay and I'm assuming it is on the whatever documents you got, there's a contact reach out to that. That's who it goes to. It's Lindsay, head of operations at Copilot. So she's processing everything, making sure everything's getting signed correctly etc. So you could reach out to her if you have not funded. If you've already funded your account you can just go in through the the dashboard, go to Invest with a Gust Nation and submit another form for the new amount that you want to add on to and that would be fine so but otherwise just respond back to Lindsey or I'll just put her thing in the chat since I'm not 100% sure it actually shows this through Carta. Give me one second, I will type it into the chat. So if you would like to respond directly and you haven't funded she can go in and have them change the documentation.

Let CRM.com Lindsay go. There's your email. It's in YouTube. Comments Lindsay Gall G A L L copilotcrm.com she she can edit that for you and then resend it back to you.

All right, we're back. Next question.

Coach Connor, as Augusta gets bigger, will there be plans to help the financial literacy side or will this burden be on of the business owner to learn and collect the knowledge? I asked because as we grow or open multiple locations over the years, et cetera, knowing why we are not Prof. We are or are not profitable, when will we be profitable, the difference between reinvesting versus actually losing money, cash flow positive etc. Etc. Will only become more and more important. I know it's our responsibility to run a clean business. However, with doing coaching calls and I personally grow and as I personally grow I say this is a very common theme. My thought is that we shouldn't have to guess if we will be profitable this month and either be disappointed or excited when you see the P and L things like buying used and repairing versus leasing, knowing customer acquitting costs, knowing the funnels that lead to profit, buying out a competitor, fund growth, all sorts of things.

Some of it seems like the numbers run us and I'd prefer it be the other way around. As we are looking into the 800,000 to million plus stage plus plans of adding multiple locations, I'm looking at a fractional CFO could be the wrong term to help with some strategy and help us get ready to open more locations over the years or accomplish 10 million revenue down the road. Etc. Also to leave I can to I can to rock a bass pro hat. Okay, questions Very good. First off, this part is is a really good question.

I've thought a lot about this and I would like to jump into this more in 2026. The challenging part with this is several things.

When you get outside of a business model when you get outside of a business model and you start thinking about personal finances, it all comes down to your personal goals. So like how I've always think thought about and this is like how most franchises look at it because I've talked to like Anytime Fitness about this. I've talked to other franchisors like how do we address this problem? Because this is actually usually the root problem with the business problems is with a business model you have certain things that you can predict and you can keep in certain inside certain constraints. Personally it's very difficult because people have different habits, they have different beliefs, they have different relationships, they have different standards of living, they have different budgets. There's all these different things that like, convolute what the model looks like. And so it's very easy when they create a business model. It become very weird. If I said this is the way that you should run your personal finances and your goals should be aligned with this thing. And like creating a personal model, it would, it would be weird. And it's very difficult because everyone has different backgrounds, different goals, they're in different stages of life, et cetera. And so most of the time my focus is how do we create a business model that is a copy and paste model that creates money. And if it does that, then people are able to kind of figure out how they want to invest, how they want to spend, how they want to, their standard of living, et cetera. Like I've seen a couple locations where I've looked at their financials and I've seen, okay, if this person, like, if this person over here just copied their, like the exact same business model is being ran over here, like same size, same profits, et cetera. But for some reason, number one person fails, they go out of business. Number two person continue to grow, succeed and become profitable and start more locations. Why is that? Many times because the personal side is not on, on lock. The budget's messed up, they're overspending, they, they have bad debt, they took a lot of bad debt before.

They may. Or a spouse that has had bad debt or bad spending habits. So there's all these other things. And so it's much more predictable to create a business model that everyone can copy and paste. That being said.

This is definitely top of mind, especially like this July when we're doing the seven figure club. It's going to become more and more. It's like that information starts getting distilled down and actually creating systems around, okay, what does stage seven of wealth look like where you start to think about multiple locations, but also you think about investing real estate tax strategies. How do I make sure that like your spouse, for example, if they're a real estate professional, and then you go buy a piece of property, you can immediately get all, everything written off in the same year as an expense instead of doing a capital depreciation using accelerated depreciation, but that requires, you know, having a study on the, on the property and getting things measured, etc. So.

That will be important. I think down the road. I think that.

It'S something that's been on my mind because like, even, even in the smaller sizes of business, it's so often the personal spending habits and the Ways that the money is spent and like bad habits that actually create the problems in the business.

Down to this part down here is somewhat of a different question in my mind about like knowing your numbers specifically like cash flowing, et cetera. I do think once you get multiple locations, having a fractional CFO is not a bad idea. There's several really good one you could go upwork there is Cycle cpa. They did use this service as well. And it is until you are probably doing 20 million a year. Do you need someone on retainer as a cfo?

Chief financial officer. But if you can get someone to be able to do it, you know, once a quarter go over your financials, it's helpful especially if you're being massive growth mode. So if you're like you're leveraging yourself, you're taking on more more debt to be able to start more to locations and you're okay with it because you just want to. You'd rather grow this thing in five or ten years instead of taking forever to do whatever you're trying to accomplish. So especially if you're leveraging yourself because a good CFO can give you some good ideas around like way to handle taxes. Sometimes they'll be like yeah, you should go into debt. And this is where like when you talk to a cfo, they'll have a very much more nuanced opinion than what you would otherwise think I have. If you listen to my public content. The reason is because I know my public content is 95% of people that will watch that video will misuse information as well as 50% of them that do start will be out of business in five years. And if they have debt, I will have some level of, of responsibility for that. And so that's why I am most people would say I'm the no debt person. When in reality, if you talk to most CFOs, assuming you're growing and assuming you are, you have a decent gross profit margin, you should actually take on debt because you're able to take the cash that you would otherwise spend on trucks and equipment and put it into growth. So it's not a bad idea. Especially if you're in the first like I would say like the first five years until you're. You can really say a business is become profitable, then it has become stabilized in that profitability. Usually it means having a general manager in place. That being said, if you're starting to to start more locations, if you're starting to invest in real estate or whatever it might be, you're starting to do these other things, it can push that, push that threshold of pain further down the road because you're, you're taking on more. More assets, you're taking on more liability in terms of employees, but you're also taking on more risk by having debt, for example. But having a CFO that knows what they're doing, they can really use this to be able to.

You know, figure out what you're, what you should be doing. Now do I think that if you have one location, you need a cfo? Probably not. You should probably just talk to your accountant that does your taxes and figure out what's best for this year's taxes. And they'll have enough of an opinion on debt as to whether or not it would be helpful to do that. But when you start doing multiple locations, you have different tax codes, for example, different cities, different states, for example. There starts to be real strategy in how to play this. I think the other thing I would say Connor is thinking about. Sorry, not Connor. Sorry. What I would say is there's a really good document on breaking down what you make, like what your break even per hour is. And it goes down to like breaking down the very cost of your trimmer, your weed whack, your line, like every little thing. I know Nick's gone over that before. He might have it recorded. Nick, if you're watching this, maybe this is something for office hours to go over. Is breaking down your hourly cost what your break even is per hour, what you should price based upon that? And the reason is that is so important is because you can take someone who's charging 85 bucks an hour and someone else who's charging 85 bucks an hour, and one of them is making a bunch of money, like 15 to 20 bucks an hour on profit, and the other one is losing a dollar or two dollars per hour. And that simply could be they're out of their service area, like in terms of their shop space or their shop space cost five grand a month. So like it completely changes your. Your structure of your hourly break even. So maybe that's a document. Nick him resurface. It's in the academy, it's on the dashboard. But maybe he can resurface that. I know he's been going through that recently. Maybe on the office hours maybe did it. I was watching the other day. But it certainly be something to maybe look at. If, if you're thinking like, do, am I making money? Am I not making money? That'd be a great document to go through. It takes a While and you're going to have to really pull up some receipts to figure out like, okay, how much do I actually spend in gas every month? How much do I actually spend on each of my truck payments? Truck one truck two truck three truck. But if you put all the numbers into that document that I have there, it will spit out an exact hourly rate that you need to make to make even. It's. It's pretty good. So I would recommend using that. And yeah, if Nick is. Is mentioned that maybe this would be a helpful framework for the coaches to go over too for next month. So I'll talk to Nick about this one. Resurface. An old document that we have in the the dashboard would not be a bad thing to do every once in a while because you should never, you know, never be wondering, do I make money? We should know what our break even is to cover fixed expenses. We should know how many hours, budget hours we need to hit to have on the schedule to hit that. And then we should be constantly. That's. That's what I'm looking at is like here's what I know I need to make break even. Here's how many budget hours of work need to be on the schedule to hit break even. If said budget hours are below that threshold, I'm going to lose money. And so yeah, Coach Garner, I can bring this up to ATC as a request. This is 100% on the cruise for not reading notes. However, a feature I miss an essay is that I required. It required you to check off the notes before clocking or out of the job. Is this something you can do in Copilot? I'm thinking this would be helpful for adding new notes and just that they legit have to check off what they read, what that they read the list. Is this something we can do currently? If so, I'll dig in with dig in and ask adc. It's not something you can do now. That being said, Field Force, please, once they give version one, give this feedback. I'm pretty sure this has already been voiced, but it won't be coming out in the mvp, the minimum viable product. It will not come out in that version to my knowledge. But I know it's in the works and is being talked about for version two. So what's going to happen is the MVP is going to come out. You'll be able to download it, use it. It will be functional. It'll be very useful for your team. Made sure it crosses that line. It is better than what they currently are using that being said, there's a whole bunch of things we have because there's an infinite amount of cool doodads we could tack onto something. But what's going to happen, we put the MVP out and what we're going to do simply do is like wait for feedback and see what are the loudest, like what do people really, really want and what, what they're talking about. So when the MVP comes out, the surveys that come in, we look at every single one and we will go through them. So please, please, please give that feedback. And this would be one of them. I know it's already on the agenda but it'd be a matter of like getting this pushed to the top. So that would be my plea. I know like when people see surveys like ah, it's just going to the best, I promise you, every single one gets looked at, read and discussed in Design View meetings. And so when that happens for the mvp, please make sure you submit feedback. You're going to see the same thing next week come out. All the feedback that's been given from the estimate portal, there's a whole bunch of really cool stuff that they're modifying, changing, you know, where do we put the dollar signs, all this sort of stuff, we track the data, we take feedback and then we're going to deliver something really cool. All this feedback based upon those surveys from the estimate portal and that'll be coming out next week. So I'm looking forward to seeing that. There's one really cool feature in there I really look forward to sharing with everyone. It's kind of a hidden thing we haven't been talking about, but it is there nonetheless and it will really help with prepayments and just cash flow in general and projects. So looking forward to sharing that with next week as well. Mr. Anonymous recently bought 10,000 every door direct mailers through the Augusta portal. We bought the small, more contemporary, modern looking ones that look more flashy. Our local postmaster said we can't use them because they don't meet dimension requirements and they are basically useless. We have tried dropping them off four different times and we get the same response every time we go in. Is there a way to get a refund through vistaprint because they were marketed as every door at mailers and usps saying they're not. Man, this is so frustrating. Um, so I would just say first off for anyone, use the newest ones that we have in there because what we did on the newest designs is we made sure it crossed off every possible thing in, in their requirements. That being Said there are a couple in there that vistaprint still allows you to get that. Say there are every door direct mail and they should go out. Like I have yet to see someone. Never actually get them out. My recommendation, whoever this is, is try a different post office in, in the zip codes that you're sending. So if you only have one off the post office, that could be a problem. But if you could take it to a different post office in like a different zip code, potentially.

Yeah, that stinks. Try to get through your postmaster any way, shape or form, like.

Cause you're probably using the small. If they're smaller, small, more contemporary, modern ones.

I don't know which one that is. I'm assuming those are the smaller ones from back in the day because the ones we have now are like a little bit oblong, like, but they, they're within the 8 and a half 11. Like we had to do a bunch of stuff to make sure every little thing was done. But still to this day people sometimes say that they're not allowed and then they eventually get through. But yeah, this is annoying. Sorry.

That we just take out all old designs inside there. But like, they say it, they're allowed and like that's why it says, still says eddm. If you could do me a favor and let us know which of these designs is happening, just email mediagustalongerservices.com at least we can know because if this happens, we need to take it out of. Even if vistaprint says we need to take it out.

But just let us know. But I would say as a workaround I'd be trying to go to different post office. So in my market we have two post offices. One of them was always super picky and annoying, the other one literally wouldn't look at it and they take the boxes from me and go. So hopefully you can do that.

If not, I would also try to write to your postmaster. Usually most post offices you can get in a direct email to them. You can find out who they are, it's usually published and go directly to them. And even if you're like, hey, I will in the future make sure I do X, Y and Z, whatever they're telling you. But like, can you please get these 10,000 out for me? That would be my, my.

My, my advice there. But yeah, please do let us know so we at least keep track. To my knowledge, no one's ever not been able to send them out period. But if, if, if, if that happens, we at least need to keep track of like is it happening once, twice. And if we just need eventually tell Vistaprint to remove it and even can a certain size, because I've seen in Vistaprint they allow still a whole bunch of different sizes that are not compliant that you can just like custom design inside of the portal. Like we need to tell them somehow if we can just not allow those to be sold. So sorry about that. That's super annoying. All right everyone, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day and we will see you tomorrow. Take care.