Mike Minutes Mastermind 04/26/2024

Nation. Welcome to another edition of the Mike Minutes, Mastermind here on Friday.

April 26th. Let's go. I have this new solution for making sure everyone gets the text message, or at least the bulk of everyone does. I sent a text message to myself, so I just got it. So I know at least half of you have got it so far. All right, speaking of which, we got Ken from Fenton, Michigan coming in hot here. After sending out the text for Mastermind, instead of waiting around 10 minutes, is there something you could do for 10 minutes and then join then that way you don't feel like you're wasting your time. Well, I don't think waiting around is what exactly I'm doing. I am doing other stuff, but it is tough to find two minutes and three minute old tasks. Usually the things I try to chunk in the morning are bigger things, but we can handle it. We're good. All right, I do have some announcements.

Let's jump into them. Numero uno.

If not today, tomorrow, Nick Reed, owner test manager, will send out the survey. Again, don't know what happened there. We sent it out to early sentence to Lee myself. We filled it out, we push all the buttons. Seem to work just fine. But because some of the questions were not required, there's a way to get around them. And so some people didn't see some of the questions. So we apologize for that.

Surveymonkey seems to have its own little way of doing things. We've had the same issue sometimes with the exam on final exam at training and it took us a couple times to kind of hone it in. So we apologize for that. We'll redo that. I apologize if you spent a lot of time giving us feedback.

But we will get that out again and Nick will make sure triple, quadruple check, send it a bazillion times to ourselves and see if we can break it. Push every single number, push every single thing and see if we can get around questions. So apologize for that. That'll come out later today. The next thing is a challenge. All right. So this can make you some serious dough. Okay, so this is my challenge because I have this hunch. Instead of testing it for a month, I'd rather just test over the weekend with all of you. And this is my hunch.

I think if you're doing follow up calls and you've done two, maybe three of them, what might be more impactful is to do a loom or a screen recording with your face and the estimate and literally just pull up copilot or pull up The PDF of your estimate and screen record yourself with the camera on your computer. And you can do use Loom. I think they allow up to like five minutes for free. You can use a gazillion screen recording softwares and send that link to the customer. I happen to think it'll blow people's socks off more than even a follow up phone call. That's a voicemail, is literally an email that says I made this quick video for you with a link to Loom and It's literally a two minute screen recording of you. Mike. Hey Mr. Jones, just Mike here, just following up with you last week I know he sent out the estimate. I wanted to go over it with you, make sure I actually got all your questions answered and literally go through the estimate with them. Just talk about it with them. I know, I know you'd said it. You really like the red molten, so the brown mulch. So I went ahead and put the red mulch in here. I think 4 yards do the trick. Should get about 2 inches of coverage across the whole property. If you wanted to add some in the back, just let me know I can get this added in here, etc. Etc. Etc. And then literally you could be like I think we could actually get it fit in next Thursday. So hit me back. I'm gonna go ahead and actually reserve your spot in the schedule. And like you just literally do what you would usually do on a phone call but have their estimate, it's gonna have their name, their address, it's going to look beautiful. And you could do it in copilot. So they will literally see in your screen recording that you can see that they open up the estimate. So I think there's a way to flush out people that are ghosting you if you do it and go by. You could also just screen record the PDF. Totally fine. So here's my challenge. From now till Monday, if you do this and you close a job, all I need you to do is post that video in the Facebook group and I'm going to give you 10 bucks. Okay. So I will write a checkout. Well, someone will write a checkout, send it to you in the mail. It's the easiest way to send money still. And all you need to do is post a video saying this job was accepted and share the loom video or the screen recording inside the Facebook group. That's all we need to do. You can do it in a thread if you like four or five. Totally fine. So that's my challenge. And if you're a general manager and you close the deal. I'll still give you $10 per estimate. Accepted. Using this strategy this weekend. Alright, so all I need is a recording that you sent to the customer saying that I will take your word for it that you closed the job and is accepted based upon that video. I think this is going to work really well for several reasons because if you've left two voicemails and you're following up, I think this will take just as long to do a quick loom video. You copy the link, you throw it into an email. I think it'll work really well. Instead of me testing it for a month though, I just put this as a challenge. Especially if you're getting less than 20 or 30 estimates a week. Highly recommend this. If you're getting, you know, 50, 60, 70 leads a week, you're probably not too concerned. You're probably booked out far. If that would be what would be wrong with using Venmo or. Oh, there's another question. I thought you were talking about sending out my challenge checks.

So that's the challenge for the week, the weekend. If you would like to participate, all you need to do is record the video and your follow up calls, send it to the customer, get the job accepted, post it in the Facebook group and I will give you $10 per estimate. Accepted. All right, what's this question? What would be wrong with using Venmo or some other cash app instead of PayPal? No fees seems better than percentage lost. You could.

In terms of the the tip. I guess that's what you're talking about.

The thing about PayPal is most people have more trust in PayPal.

And the older generation is used to PayPal, Venmo Cash app, etc more of the newer generation. The age demographic tends that way but I'm not opposed to it honestly. You could just change the buttons on your tip thing to be like PayPal Venmo Cash app and then they just push on the button they want. I would change the color background to be the color of the logo of that specific, you know, thing down the road in Copilot we want to make sure where people can tip even if they're on recurring service and they are having a paid invoice and it's inside, it's more integrated instead of them having to push a button for PayPal, Venmo, whatever. So. All right, let's jump into questions. But that was my challenge for the day. Oh no, I had another thing I'll do education at the end.

Let's jump into questions.

Okay. Yeah, the education part's not right.

Okay, let's see what we got here. Questions? Oh, there's four today.

Look at that. All right.

I looked up location on my laptop to see where I ranked. I didn't see anything pop up for my location or other guest locations around me. Then I realized my laptop was default using Bing on the Google Chrome browser. Oh yeah, you gotta love that. And clicked on the business section which brings version of Google which is like Bing's version of Google business profiles. Is it a good idea to set up profile? Makes me wonder how many other people's computers use that rather than Google's. Yeah, if I remember correctly, last time I checked this, usually between 8 and 10% of desktop search is from Bing. I think most of the time it's because of what you just did and it's like you accidentally used it and it defaults. A lot of times when you reset your.

Your PC, it'll reset your browser default to Bing. That's just my personal thing. But it's usually between 8 and 10% on desktop traffic is from Bing. Highly recommend you to set up that account.

Highly recommend. This is why like even with showcase reviews, there's a ton of other review sites you can use in addition to Google. And are they as powerful like no, still like 90 plus percent of traffic in terms of search comes through Google. But there's no hurt in getting ranking in those other ones. So yeah, I would set it up. It's definitely not going to hurt you guarantee you that.

Mendoza from I can't say this, I always mess this up. From Seuss City, Iowa. All right. I know that you'll be working on copilot for scheduling and routing Right now I use optimized and safer routing but sometimes it changes the routing during the day by itself. My crew, they're upset because they didn't make P for P and I am frustrated. See pictures below. They mode number 11 next to 12 but 13 it was next to 11. So you go back to 13, it was about 20 minute drive. I had the same issue before. I called a book with Errol and I explained to him and he said it changed in the day based on traffic or accident. Any update when scheduling routing will be better or any suggestion I should do differently? Thanks, Mike. So two things. One, all the routing is done by a company outside of us. In terms of the actual routing itself, the thing that I have seen happen is if you make a change to a recurring visit after it is.

Inside of a route, sometimes that can reset it based upon what you do with the visit. Like if you change the date or you change.

Sometimes it'll reset your route or it'll bring it outside of the route. I've seen it happen a couple times. It should not be doing that, but I have seen that happen a couple times. So I, I'm. I know what you're saying, like basically you're next to somebody. Let me just open this up. I see what you're doing here. One second.

Share this tab.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So.

Yeah, I would.

I would say, I would imagine that it's actually that the issue is actually more on the part of a change was made to a job on the route and it threw a monkey wrench into it which should not be happening. So the dispatch board in general we have a ton of updates for mostly around like seeing multiple days in the dispatch board, being able to.

Route based upon just clicking the numbers on the map, things like that.

The coloring on the dispatch board so that your crews are all matched based upon color down below instead of just being one shade, things like that. So you don't have to keep scrolling up between the map and the bottom bar. Those things are coming down the pipe. Actually 70% done. So I get to this bug stuff.

Thomas double zero one. Oh, this is Thomas Salard. Dude, man, you guys make this tough on me. All right, this is Thomas Salazar Littles in Colorado. Is there a way to mass text clients from the estimate pending page other than the estimate itself? I'm looking to send pre written follow up text in a bulk fashion. It looks like the only option for the estimate page is to send the estimate again. I don't think we're allowed to do that. Yeah, because.

What you're trying to do is set bulk send all your estimates via text messages and Twilio doesn't allow us to use that merge tag in bulk like that.

When I say merge tag I mean like the one linking to our client portal. So I'm guessing that's what you're talking about. You're trying to set all of your estimates from the estimates page via text. We don't allow that. And most of it's like stuff with Twilio. One thing for example, we're looking into seeing if we can do before we have to start charging people for bulk texting is is there a way for Twilio to be able to like soft ping the phone number and see if it's even a cell phone that could take a text? Because otherwise every single time we hit their API we get charged and we have to charge the user, but then probably about 20%, 30% of phone numbers, depending on the market.

Can'T accept text messages. So anyways, all of that say you can't bulk send text message estimates right now, to my knowledge, someone has a workaround. I would not put it past the ability to have a workaround. All right, this is from Mr. Anonymous. We had some people the other day very unhappy that we allowed Mr. Anonymous to leave. Questions?

All right, I've heard you and Lee mention less than 50 of calls are allowed to be. No, that's not true. It's like less than 12%. So it's like one out of eight. One out of nine. Because, like, right now. Let me pull it up. Let's see how many people have applied right now. I will give you the numbers. I know it's changed a little bit. I usually say one out of eight, but I think it might have changed. One second, let's pull up lead count. Okay, let's see here. So we have seven. It's there. 764.

Plus 764 plus 150. 914 divided by one. Ah, I did it wrong. Sick. So 150. So. Okay, give me one second, guys. I want to give you the exact number. 764 plus 150. There's the total. And then I want to do 150 divided by 914. 16%. Where's the camera? One second.

That's 16%. So if I take 16%. So it's like one out.

Seven. So one out of seven. So 16. Not. Not 50. I'm curious, what are the reasons you will not allow someone to join? Okay, any new filters in place versus what are allowed? Okay, great, Great question. Great question. Okay, number one, this is a vibe check. This is like, will this owner be a good person that we all want to see over and over and over again? Will they treat other owners inside of a destination? Will they give more than they take? That's the definition of a great community. Is everyone thinking in that way? The classic example is, what can you give to your country instead of what can you take from your country? That sort of situation.

If everyone in the community is constantly thinking about, how can I improve everyone else's business? How can I make everyone else successful? If everyone thinks like that in a community, that community will crush butt. And so if someone comes into that call being like, well, can I do this? And I want more coaching and I want to have this, and I think, will they give me leads and like can you guarantee me I'll get 50 leads a week?

Can I have more of this and more of that? And they always take, take, take, take, take from other owners too. Well, I want to like push up against their boundary. Can I get leads inside their territory? They're that way. We don't want them around. Well, people that are trying to give back to the community.

And the way that I'm building the business, building the franchise is in that way and it's thinking about the community. And if people that join the community aren't thinking that way, I don't want to do business with them. I want honestly to be able to every day I hop on these calls to want everyone on here to be winning. And if that. If there are people that don't think in terms of the community of August Nation, I don't probably, I don't really want them to win. And so it would be detrimental to how inside of August Nation.

That's like the first thing.

The vibe like that is like a huge deal of it. Then it's a matter of are they actually a right fit for Augusta? And what we've seen recently is much more sophisticated people coming into these calls with Lee in terms of business experience there's very few people coming in like no experience of business. Watch Mike's videos hopping on. These are people that have discussed this is their second business, this is their third business. They already have a seven figure lawn care business. They're already doing 5, 600, $700,000. They realize that $1200 a month covers a lot of things that they're already paying for in terms of the website, P4P software etc and so it's like very logical buyers now. Whereas especially the first 50 like that I was reading through a lot of people was like they're fans and that's why I was letting them go. It's because it's like look, I'm not going to build your business for you. I'm not going to do everything for you. I can't do that. You're going to stop to grind and hustle. It's going to be difficult. So.

If their expectations are incorrect, it's a big reason why we won't let people in. We want them to succeed. And what we've learned over the past like 150 is what are the difference between people who win and win and lose. If they can't get past 200,000 annual revenue, their chances of, of failure are much, much higher if they can scale past that. So a lot of times it comes down to their ability to sell, their ability to be able to.

Learn new things.

Things like that. Number two, any new filters in place that was allowed or overlooked before 100%. It all comes down to capitalization. I was talking with the Franchise Advisory Council about this.

If we just said everyone had to have $50,000 of cash before they joined Augusta, we would probably have eliminated 95% of people that have ever joined and then couldn't make it past their first year. The solo operators for example, they're more likelihood of them failing because they don't have capital. Capitalization is a massive part of why a business fails because if you have enough capital, you get through the rough times much easier. You have the ability to be able to spend money on leads and ads. You have the ability to spend money on hiring people faster, getting trucks and equipment faster, raising capacity quicker. You're okay with your customer acquisition cost being $100 instead of $20. You don't have to do door hangers so it's less of a grind. Throw money at Facebook and Google for example. So capitalization is a huge deal. The bottom line is what I told I was talking with the Franchise Advisory Council is I am willing to have a less of a success rate in the franchise, which is a big deal from a franchising perspective. Perspective. Here's the thing. I'm not trying to sell it, so I don't care as much about that number. The reason I am okay with allowing people to have less money is because you can compensate for having less money and less capitalization by simply having great determination, stick to itiveness, work ethic, etc. And there, there's, there's multiple people have joined us, solo operators that now are growth model that are doing 100 plus thousand dollars per month in revenue. And I'm not going to take that opportunity away from people that only have 20, 30 grand. But they're willing to work seven days a week and put in the grind. Because that's what I did. That's how I started Augusta. So you know that that is where all of our quote unquote failures, I don't like to call failures but like the people who have not worked out long term, it's the people that were under capitalized, they started mostly as solo operators or they got started and realized entrepreneurship wasn't for them. And it's usually within the first 12 months, it's usually they fail to sell. But again I'm not going to remove the sole operator model or take away the like, we don't have a hard set. You must have a certain amount of dollars in your bank account. Because I also know that people can compensate and make up for that difference by just crushing it, working hard, and bleeding out of their eyeballs. And so most franchises, they do require a lot of capital. When I say a lot of capital, I'm talking hundreds of thousands of dollars for you to be able to join. And that's why they. Their claim to fame is like, we have a 2 or 3 or 4%, you know, failure rate. Augusta's is higher. It's like 6 or 7% over the course of five years. And it's still way better than independent. However, I know that number would be less than half if we just said you have to have $100,000 to join. But also, I wouldn't have been able to join Augusta until I was like.

22. So, like, like, I wouldn't be able to do it. So I want to give that opportunity a chance. And I'm not looking to make that vanity metric of success rate super high because.

I'm not trying to sell Augusta. That's the honest truth. But in terms of filters, we are looking at how much capital they have, because it is like, if you don't have $50,000, you better be able to grind and hustle and work, work and be able to sell, like, knock on doors, be able to figure out marketing in your area and just grind enough. Because if you don't have 50,000, like, 50,000 by the time you come for training, pay your initial fee, buy a truck, buy equipment, you don't have a ton of money. And if you have like $20,000 or $25,000 and you're joining a solo operator, you have no money once you get your equipment. And so if you're not willing to just literally grind and use the rule of 100 and do door hangers and cold call and follow up on every single estimate and be very ruthless, you will likely not succeed. And so we are bringing that, that realization and that gravity to owners and be like, hey, we're not going to refuse you because you don't have money because you have the work ethic. However, keep in mind, this is going to be 10 times harder because you don't have money. Anyone that says having money is going to make it, like, doesn't change starting a business. They are so off base. When you have money, it's easier to start a business. This is why success compounds and you have exponential growth, is because if you have $300,000 and you were starting a business, the likelihood of being successful much higher than if you have 30,000. Just the straight math. You can spend way more customer acquisition cost. And a wise man once said, whoever can pay the most to get the customer wins the game. And so if two businesses are starting and one is their customer, acquisition cost caps out at 50 bucks and the other one's willing to pay $200. Who do you think is going to grow fastest?

So anyways, good question.

It seems when you add payment, auto sends paid receipt to customer. It's the same for all card charges. Or do you have to manually send paid receipt? You can change this however you would like.

In terms of if they get the paid receipt or not or if you do it manually. I know some people. I'm a big fan of not sending out paid invoice receipts if you're doing weekly billing. If you're doing monthly billing, I see more valid del validity to it. But I really like the idea of weekly billing. Don't send them a paid invoice receipt. And even monthly. Like the only reason I like to do it monthly is because you're gonna have some months where they have four charges and some of them have five. And every single time there's a five, they're gonna call and why is it different? I saw my payment. Did my price go up? They're gonna do that. But if you're doing weekly where every single time you're charging the same amount. I wouldn't send the paid invoice receipt. Or is a video of you going over why employees don't want overtime when being paid PvP. I believe it is on the.

You see if it's pinned one second.

On the Facebook group.

Yeah, on the Facebook group featured at the very top. It's a 17 minute video where I explain P4P. I think it's in there. If it's not Dustin, it is probably on the P4P page of Academy on the dashboard where I have several videos explaining P4P for a guestination for your team. So it's in one of those two spots.

All right. I had quick edumocation. Kind of led right direction actually into what we were just talking about.

The Franchise Advisory Council. Sorry I keep referring to them, but we love them very much.

We were talking and it was really good, really good discussion. And we were talking about two different owners and don't try to figure out who it is. Don't do that stuff. I'm just trying to make a point. We're all family we love each other and it means I can take from what we learn from each other and I can hopefully apply it so other people don't go through it. So please, if you're like, that's me, don't get them. Don't be hurt, okay? We were talking about two different owners, very similar age, very similar experience, very similar occupation prior to join Augusta. And we, we were talking about the, the divergence of their, of their success. And I truly believe that the only thing that actually with the frontline team members at Augusta yesterday, during our weekly.

Meeting and talking about finances, et cetera, I said, look, the only thing, the only thing blocking you from what you're making in money today and what money you want to make in the future is skills. The only difference. And so money will simply follow the person that has the highest skill. So, for example, if you are picking up garbage, you're probably going to make minimum wage, that skill the market only values at a certain rate. If you are able to code at a very high level using a code language like Ruby on Rails or PHP or JavaScript or whatever, that skill will probably be valued five to ten times higher than picking up garbage on the side of the road.

But it took somebody learning and getting a skill. The difference between the $15 an hour and the $150 an hour is that someone that went and either went to school or they went, did a coding boot camp, they went and worked as an intern at making no money to be able to get the skills required to be able to be that developer. And so it actually stemmed from one of the team members asking like, you know, is college worth it? Kind of thing. I said, look, I looked at my developers and there are some of them, we pay over $300,000 per year. And I said, none of them went to school. What do they do? They spend 10 to 15 years working for basically nothing and grinding and hustling as interns to learn code and working at jobs to build their resume and getting skills. That's what they're doing. They are acquiring skills. And so if you're like, I'm at 100,000 in annual revenue, I want to build a million dollar business. What's the, what do I need to do? You need to gain skills. That's it. That's the only difference between where I am at today and where I want to become is skills. And so if you earn a hundred thousand, what do I need to become a millionaire? You probably need the skills of leadership. You probably need the skills of being able to sell and scale that you need the ability to be able to teach someone else how to sell. You need to be able to teach someone else how to manage. Those are the skills that are going to be required for you to go from a hundred thousand to a million. Things that got you to where you are today will not be the things that get you to the next place in your career in net worth in money earning potential. And so how do you get those skills is the question. And so at the front team members meeting the other day, I said, look, the reason we have 400 some odd books in audible is because those are simply places for you to go garner skills. And Lee was in the meeting yesterday. Soon he won't be and he'll be very sad. But he was in the meeting yesterday at the Bellingham shop. And I said the reason Lee went from mowing grass to becoming an estimator to becoming a general manager to then selling franchises across the world is because he took that audible program and listened to every single sales related book he garnered the skills required to take his earning potential to the next level. And so, um, that's not onto the job training. That is going to be outside of work. It's going to be while you're working out. It's going to be while you're driving garnering the skills required to make more money. And.

It might take years of garnering skills before you actually see it reflected in your earning potential. And most people are not willing to wait for that difference in time. And they have this. They're like, I have skills. They get impatient. This is what most people would say is impatience, but really what it is is your skills. You have acquired the skills and your earning potential is lagging. And that's why people will like job hop. They're like, I have all this. And they do. It's like, look, just stay in one spot for a few years. Garner up credibility inside the organization so that your skills can be reflected in the work that you do and actually have an impact because now you actually have credibility with your team.

So sometimes impatience will actually prevent someone who has the skills from actually seeing the earning potential not follow behind them. But.

If you want to grow your business or if it's topping out, it's like, oh man, I'm just hitting up 4, 300, 400,000. I can't get past it. The only thing that's blocking you is skills like, oh no, it's finding employees that is a skill. It's managing employees is a skill. Selling more jobs like I'm stuck at 150,000 I just can't get selling jobs is a skill and what's cool about skills that they can be learned it's not talent it can be learned. You can learn how to do door hangers you can learn how to do follow up calls you can learn how to do these loom video that I just mentioned and sell more jobs so it's the beautiful thing about.

The world we live in today. All right I love you all have a fantastic weekend. I know many of you will be working on the weekend. This is spring rush. I made a video on the Facebook group but leads are now up year over year compared like week each week. That's awesome. Definitely a bit of a delay compared to last year but we are getting more leads per location basically every metric more more mowing more project everything so fantastic. Let's keep it up and let's capitalize on this bad boy and love you all. Take care.