Mike Minutes Mastermind 04/27/2023

Hey everyone. Hope you're doing super well. Got some announcements and then we'll jump right into questions. Just copy this over to the Facebook group real quick if you haven't seen it already. I do recommend.

Looking at.

This video here that was posted last night. It looks like it's one of the cohorts that came last year to training and they have part one, part two, because Dustin's cheap and doesn't want to pay $10 for Zoom. But it's really good, really a good call. I wanted to say if you do these calls with groups, one thing I did I like they did is Dustin had kind of a bit of a timer on them. So kind of where it was like, you know, you had like three or four minutes to share and then people asked you one or two questions and you move on the next person. I thought I really liked that. Like three minutes to share, two minutes to ask questions of each person and then they just moved it around. I thought that was really good way to keep the call moving so it doesn't get really long and laborious. So highly recommend watching those. They were definitely good insight and kept things moving along and with a time. I think it's really good. Like if you do these calls say, hey, we're going to do it for one hour. We're going to get five minutes a piece. Three minutes of that's going to be.

Sharing X, Y and Z questions like they did in this one, and then two minutes, people can pepper you with questions. We move on to the next person. That'll probably put you around like 30, 40 minutes depending on people on the call. And then you have 15 to 20 minutes of just kind of back and forth based upon what was said and it's a really good move. So if you're going to do these kind of like breakout sessions, definitely recommend doing watching these kind of seeing how they, they ran this meeting. I really like the time constraint of like one hour. Hey, we're doing this for one hour, then we're out. Because a lot of times people will not join these type of breakout sessions because it's like, man, like do I get on this thing? It's a three hour call. Like, you know, so the same thing as like a roundtable. I try to keep it like at one hour because otherwise people just don't want to hop on. They don't know when it's going to end. Someone can just keep going on and on and on. So great work on that one, Dustin, and thanks for doing that.

All right. I had Another announcement probably later this evening. If not tomorrow, you'll hear from Zach on the Facebook group. Keep an eye on it. We are going to test something out on all of you, and if it works well, we're going to do it for all your employees. And what that is is it is a software we purchased that it makes it really, really easy to get a link and immediately record a testimonial video. And then that video automatically goes into the software and it designs a really nice page of testimonials. I want to try that with all of you and hopefully get 20 or 30 of you to leave a review. Then we're going to make sure everything is working well. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to share you a link probably in a week or two that is for your employees that you can share with your top performers. And we can grab all those videos and create a page that you can link off of on your careers tab or any other like, indeed ad or anything like. And you just be like, wonder what it's like working at Augusta. Colon link. And that bad boy would. We can literally get hundreds of our. Of our team members to leave. You know, their. That P4P works that they did well. They had to kind of, you know, struggle with people beginning and then they started making more money. They became a gm, like, highly. This could be really, really good for us from a hiring perspective. So we're going to test out with all of you to make sure the tech is working well, making sure the filters are correct, made up for the testimonials when they come in. We can take out any ones that we don't want or we need to reshoot because they don't. Some people don't shoot video very well. So Zach's gonna post on the Facebook group probably today, if not tomorrow, and it'll be more of a review for you guys of Augusta. And then we're gonna make sure everything works well. And then I'll make a link for you to be able to use to give to all your team members. And don't worry, like, if someone leaves a bad one, we can take it down. But then what it does is creates a very cool, like, storyboard website that has all the videos. It's really nice UI on phone and, and desktop. That I think would be a really, really good hiring tool. There's nothing like hearing a bunch of other people say, this is my experience working at Augusta. Here's what happened to me, all that stuff. So we just want to make sure it works really well before we go out and get hundreds from all of our team members. So I would love to get like 100, 150 of our team members down the road that someone can just keep scrolling and listening and talking to and hearing from people from around the country that have worked for Augusta and talk about it. So. All right, now let's jump into.

Questions.

See here. What do we got today?

Five. Okay. Thomas from Littleton. Long jumbled two tiered question. Wow. Okay. All right, here we go. Let's say that I pay myself $1,000 a week salary through the regular payroll system. We are an S corporation, so you're getting a W2. Got it. Let's also say that I rarely take any additional money out of the business bank account for personal use for three years in a row. Okay. Our tax bill is not finalized until the following spring each year. I then pay the taxes owed from the previous year out of the business checking account. Since I haven't been setting money aside elsewhere for taxes, this happens year after year. I have only been taking out the GM's salary each year. One day I want to pull out a very large sum of money from the business's bank account to invest elsewhere like a new location. It is as if I am using the business bank bank account as a place to hold all the money to pay taxes and eventually pay myself a lump sum in the future. I'm concerned that I'm going about this all wrong. Wrong for tax purposes when the lump sum comes out and out and wrong for negatively impacting the profit sharing when we pay last year's taxes during the current year.

Wrong for paying pulling out a lump sum.

For investing later on down the road as keeping as everything keeps rolling over a year after year after year into the same business account. Questions? Am I going about it all wrong too? What does your schedule and best practice of removing money outside of a regular salary look like? Okay, great. So this gets over complicated and mostly due to the fact that people have different entity structures and types and they talk about it on social media and a lot of the ones that people talk about their C corporations, different right S Corporations and a single member llc. Any profits in the business you are getting taxed on as profits like at your nominal tax rate you personally. So what that means is when you pay taxes and we're again we're talking about income taxes right now, payroll taxes, all the other stuff that should come out as an expense to the business. But when you pay the taxes from at the end of the year on your income tax return and you're an S corp or you're a single member llc, that is not an expense the business because that has already gone through the business. It passes through to you and then you pay for that.

So like income taxes are not an expense that you put on your P and L.

It passes through the entity to you. You then have to go pay taxes on whatever comes through. So.

I would say in terms of like just simplifying it, if you're taking W2 income because you're an S corp, great. You want that number to be as low as possible. I'll just say that because you're going to get a higher tax rate on that. So you know, if you think $1,000 is right because that's what you're going to pay a gm, totally fine.

Just know that you want that number to be as low as you possibly can. Typically it needs to be reasonable though, so. And then secondly is when you take distributions out honestly, you just need to track it inside of your cookbooks as a, you know, owner's distributions, owner's investment comes in, owner's distributions goes out. And words around that are always different like owner's investment, owner distributions, people have different terms and sometimes you're Depending on your QuickBooks account, it'll have a different term, but you just need to keep track of it from a balance sheet perspective. But honestly, it doesn't affect your, your taxes because the biz like moving money in and out of the business is not an expense. When you move things.

As an owner's investment or an owner's distribution, there's no nothing happening on the profit and loss statement. That's all happening on the balance sheet. So it doesn't create expenses for your business. If you run yourself as a salaried employee, that's an expense on your P and L. And so.

If you're removing money outside your regular salary, you're just taking distributions from business checking account to my personal checking account, keep track of it as owner's distributions. And then at the end of the year that's not going to affect your P and L that you pay taxes on. So, you know, highly recommend you talk to a cpa. Obviously this is why you need to have a CPME before the end of the year. There's still the form available. You can talk to Brad if you, if you're new, if you didn't do this last year or you try to do it on your own, when you start getting S corporation territory like it is worth it to have a cpa, it just is to make sure this sort of stuff is buttoned down. But just keep in mind owner's distributions and owner's investment is a balance sheet activity. It does not affect the profit and loss statement. It does not affect the profits of the business. All right? You can move money in, in and out of your account all day long. It doesn't matter. It doesn't affect the profit and loss statement. So that's why the profit loss statement is what I do profit sharing on. Because that's what actually the business is doing. It's not what it's independent of whether or not money is coming in and out to me as the owner.

So hope it made sense. I can answer more questions about that, but honestly, it gets into the territory. Like, you need to talk to a CPA for your individual case. Kyle Darvin, you talk a lot about how you sometimes stay awake at night stressing or thinking about your businesses. Lately, with everything going on, I am feeling the same way. A little stress frazzled, et cetera. Have you found any good ways to zoom out of the daily grind and reset yourself? I'm getting better at knowing that if I, if like the next day, almost always I'm fine. Especially when it's late at night and like I'm stressing. I, I've gotten better. Just like stepping back, hey, I will wake up tomorrow and every like 95% of this will just be gone.

So I, I, I've gotten a lot better at that. There was someone I looked at yesterday, I forget who was. Let me pull it, try to see if I can pull it up. In Lee, in that podcast I do with Lee the other day, someone commented stressing about money is like something rather. Here, one second. I mean. Oh, yeah. Oh, this is funny. Oh, this is kind of funny. This is kind of funny. This is funny because this is Aaron from business boot camp, the guy that had like $400,000 in debt. He says stress over money is a mindset.

Here's the thing. Most people stress out about money.

And.

Whether or not you stress about money because like, if you have a gazillion dollars, you're stressed about money because you're wondering about how it's going to be deployed. You're gonna, you're wondering about your wills, you're setting up trusts, you're wondering how you should give that money, whether or not you should give that money to your kids, then your kids hate you because you're not giving it them money then. Or if you give it to them, then they get spoiled. Then you see your grandkids going downhill because of the money. It's like everyone stresses about money. And so.

I would say that someone's avoiding stress about money. I would look at someone like Aaron's finances and question whether or not maybe he should have more stress about his, his money problems.

And so for me, I would rather have the stress of the problems. I have a stress around money because of growth than this kind of stress. The problems and stress I've seen when I grew up with money. And that is when you don't ever have enough. And.

It'S a point of contention in relationships. Like money is never a point of contention in my relationships, ever. It might create me anxiety because I'm growing the business, but that is a choice I make. So I am in control of that stress. Like if I wanted to be less stressed, I could just not. I could stop growing the businesses, I could stop doing software, which is extremely stressful. I could start deploying and hiring. Like I could do all of those things. Like I don't need to go start location the other side of the world, outside the country. If I'm like trying to have better work life balance, it's not helpful for that. So like I am in full control of that stress. I would much rather be in that situation than be at the mercy of the government or whatever to be able to give me money. So I choose the stress I have around money. And that's something that I would rather have than saying I don't have stress because everyone has trust. My money doesn't matter what stage you're at, what level of wealth. And people are like, well, I'd love to have the problem of like, what kind of private jet should I be buying this year or should I get a second or a third one? Yeah, until you have kids, until you, everyone that you knew from high school is reaching out to you, asking for money, and now you're questioning all your personal relationships. Like there's different money problems. And so everyone has problems around money. It is a means of exchange by which we've all agreed upon a certain socioeconomic status. And therefore, regardless of where you're at in that continuum, you're going to have a problem with money.

So I would rather personally, personally just me. I would personally rather be in control of the stress and be able to throttle it as much as I want compared to someone at the mercy of someone else that is throttling their stress, whether that be a landlord, whether that be an employer, whether that be the government, whether it be a politician. And that's why so many people are so mad online and it's because they feel powerless. So anyways, that's just my rant. Okay. Number three, Kyle Tartan. After losing my gm, I can't help but feel like I am getting left behind or somehow not doing as well as I should. I know it's all my just a mindset game, but I can't help but feel that way. I came in this year feeling we would absolutely crush it. I know it's still early in the spring, but I know we have lost time now. It's going, getting to the point where I know we need to move quick to gain lost ground. Okay, so let's, let's peel this back. Compared to what? Like you've lost ground against what? Who, who are you comparing yourself to? Lost ground? Like what does that mean.

You haven't gone backwards? You know, look back two years ago, the size of your business, your level of skills, your ability to manage, you have two locations, which is extremely difficult. Going from one to two locations is literally a different business. I could listen to even what they were talking about last night. There's a couple multi location operators on the, on that call. It's a different business having two locations. You literally got into a new industry when you went from one to two, two locations. Because now you're in the game of management instead of the game of mowing grass. And typically when you're at one or two locations, you're still actually in both. You're still like, like Dustin was talking about, he's still out in the field sometimes and he's still trying to manage his gm. So it's extremely difficult. Do you really think that two years ago you had less skills, less aptitude, less connections, less abilities to generate leads? No. You've improved. So this is very harmful. You have not lost ground against anyone. This is why I'm not a huge fan of having like very set goals. Because it creates a benchmark by which I can measure myself when. For some people that's helpful. I'm not going to take that away from them. That's helpful for some people. For me I'm going to work hard no matter what and by having a goal and I reach it, it's like if I, if I crush this goal, it's like, well then, then what? Like after I get beyond my finite number that I've put in the like. This is the infinite game by Simon Sinek. Right? It's like if you create this Benchmark this finish line. Well, what happens when you hit it? Well, then what? Right? That's why everyone's like, well, how big do you want the businesses to be? What do you want to revenue? It's like I, I never have an answer because I do not have a goal for that. It's like this is the game I've chosen to play and I play it very well and I keep playing it forever. And for some people it's like, oh my goodness, like I don't have any finish line. It's like that's the whole point.

And, and the only reason you feel like you lost great lost ground is because you're paying. Playing a finite game by which you feel like there's a finish line and there's other players in the game that are racing you and that needs to be dropped.

Over here. I really wanted to open a third location this next year, but it seems like I'm going to have to get my other two locations back to square one before continuing onward. Any wisdom or advice you can share? Yeah, like please do not feel obligated or pressured to do multiple locations. It's extremely difficult to go from 1 to 2. It's extremely difficult from 2 to 3. I can guarantee this. Going from 1 to 2 is harder than going from 10 to 40. I guarantee you that. And that is how wealth works. It's always harder to go from a hundred thousand, let's just call it ten thousand year bank account to twenty thousand dollars. That could take someone years. Then from twenty to a hundred thousand could take them a few more years. But then all of a sudden they go from a hundred thousand to a million in a year. They go from a million to 10 million in two years. Like that is the exponential curve of how wealth works, especially with someone that is investing into their business. Right. So you should not compare yourself against me, who started four locations this year and I'm going to start another one in June. You should not compare yourself to any other individual. I've been doing this for nine years as Augusta. So when you've been in Augusta for nine years, then compare yourself where I'm at now. Right. Do I think, Kyle, in nine years you could have easily seven, eight locations like I do? Absolutely. 100%. Do I think that's going to happen next year or two? Probably not. That's fine. It could very likely happen in years five, six and seven. And you're comparing yourself to someone else that's in the. Has been in the game for now, nine, nine years in Augusta So stop comparing yourself. You're doing very good. It took me five, six, six years, was it seven years to get my second location? So you're doing pretty good. You're in your second year and you got your second location. And yeah, there's a lot of hurdles that come with that because I had to take six or seven years of bruises and cuts just to figure out how to get my second location. It didn't go smoothly. So don't beat yourself up. Going from one of two locations is a whole different ball game. And you're doing very well. You really got to cut the comparison to other people. That's extremely damaging. Like, there's like, this is what some people have asked me. Like, I think I've made one post ever about like crowns guys, us lawns. These other guys are doing franchising and lawn care and stuff. It doesn't matter. Like, I don't care what they're doing. If they're doing well, awesome. If they're not, who cares? I'm not trying to win against other people. I'm trying to win the game for myself, my family, and for my team. I don't really care about what everyone else is doing. So.

It'S very frame when you think of like that. Kyle Tarpon, I believe I purchased a conference ticket for John, but he will no longer be attending. Is it possible to get a refund for that or can I transfer it to someone else's name? Yeah, just email media, Augusta longer services.com. i'm assuming you bought it for next for this coming fall, but yeah, we can get transferred over. We'll get a sheet up for everyone later this summer for this coming fall conference. Blight Bryce from Vanward, Ohio. I have a customer who accepted an estimate in March for a spring cleanup. I scheduled her for last week of March. She. She called CC and she wanted to schedule it for mid April. I rescheduled her for mid April and sent a new thank you and welcome email with her new date. We serviced her and sent her the bill and she has now claimed that she canceled the service when we first scheduled her because she was on a vacation and would never have serviced her property without her being there. Cece checked the call recording. I was just about to say, like, we have these recorded. Cece, CC checked the call recording for when she called and confirmed that she did not cancel, but she had asked to reschedule for mid April. CC also confirmed that the thank you and welcome email with the new date was sent. Do I have CC email her back with proof of her confirming the service through the phone call or do I Bite the Bullet 120 service. I know I would risk a one star review, but is there a way to attach pictures to that response of a call log and email that was sent? If we are allowed to show proof of that call log, I would obviously want that sent to her first. So hopefully it would be able to show we will not back down to her false claims. If you already have the recording, I would if I was you. I just go ahead and email her, have the recording as an attachment and have exactly what time she opened up the thank you and welcome email as a timestamp. I think that's enough for her to probably back off. If it doesn't, it escalates beyond that. Like if you go. If someone. She goes online and leaves a bad review. This is great. You can literally say exactly what you said. You were rescheduled. We have their call recording that we sent to you that states this as well as a proof that you open up the email confirming the service and like that it's the way you say it. Being very professional and even keel is what future customers are looking for. So I would not worry about an online review from someone like this. Especially when you have a call recording like let's go. Makes me feel so good because it costs us almost $2,500 a month to have that on everyone's accounts. So 25, $25 times. No, it's $20. Yeah. 2,000. Yeah. $20 per. So right around 2500 bucks. All right, I think that's everyone. Let's go.

What's your opinion on buying a truck out of state Can. Ken from Michigan has been sending out. Sending great trucks. About half of the price here. Trucks are 7,000 here and 3, 500 there. I don't think it's a bad thing as long as you know the source of where they're coming from. We bought quite a few trucks out of Texas when Covid hit because we always used to buy them up from Canada. I literally never spent more than $7,000 on a truck until 2020. So sad. Now it's like you're lucky to get a good one for 12, 15 grand. Um, but.

The thing is, keep in mind, you're going to spend $2,500. You're saving $2,500. Right. The question is you're either going to get transported or you got to fly up there and bring it down. Well, now it's a matter of like lost opportunity. Could you go make $2,000 in the three days it takes you to go up there, do your stuff, and drive back. Or a day and a half or whatever. So, yeah, you might save $2,500 raw.

But if you also have to spend 500 in fuel, a day's worth of travel, and out of state taxes or something like that, might only be a thousand bucks you're saving. So there's trade offs. Depends on how busy you are, too. If you're crazy busy right now, probably not a good idea to try to save $2500 and waste half a week of bouncing around back and forth and figuring out things and then taking the risk on a vehicle that you can't see before you actually are paying for it.

So it's just a risk you take when you do that. All right, guys, have a great day and we'll see you tomorrow.