Mike Minutes Mastermind 04/27/22

Good morning, Augusta Nation. Hope you're doing super well. I didn't have anything super pressing that I wanted to go over in terms of announcements. Let me just triple check here.

Anything super up right now. So let's go ahead and go through some of these questions and see here. Share my screen.

Boom. All right, first question. Let's see. We got from Vel in Nocatee. Is there a way to call customers and leads from our local Augusta phone number so they don't end up with our personal cell? Some of the way that Google Voice functions, masking your personal number with the Google Voice number? No, we do not have this capability in terms of Ringcentral. It would really murky the waters and so we do not. However, if you go Vel onto the Facebook group, you'll see a few different chats and topics that people have gone over, kind of how they get around this. Some people like to have a separate phone completely just for business. And then how we've handled it is as long as your, your voicemail says that, hey, this is Mike, I'm the estimator at Augusta Lawn Care. And if you'd like, if you have any questions, feel free to contact the office, that's fine. That usually works out just fine because you create that delineation. And then when you're calling back customers about estimates, it's fine because they expect that because you are the estimator. So we've used that. There's other people have gotten separate phone lines just for them to be able to make call outs and that way they can turn it off in the evenings and the weekends and things like that. And that's totally fine. But I would say as long as your voicemail so that you're the estimator and it gives the phone number for the office, you're going to be fine. I got through it all without having a separate phone, but I know some people, they don't want to be bothered at all. And it's just a matter of getting a separate phone number or phone device, even if needs be, or using something like a Google Voice just to be the phone number that you call out from. That would be fine too. So it's really. Everyone has their own preferences, but we can't have it where you tap into Ringcentral and then go out because then you have access to all the numbers and it'd be all sorts of security breaches. And it's something that we're thinking a lot right now about is security stuff with everything that's gone in Russia and what I feel is going to be a massive mass cyber attacks happening in next few years. We've got to really buckle down security and if everyone has access to everyone else's ring central, like, it's just not. It's not secure. So anyways, yeah, but check out the Facebook group. There's been some good conversations about what people do to kind of fix this or have a different phone number, etc. But for us, it's like the voicemail just need to say, you're the estimator. So. So that way if they don't get a hold of you, they know that this is not a place to give customer feedback or whatever it might be. And if they do, it's still you're telling them always to contact the office. So I still see too many times when I'm helping a franchisee and they're sending me screenshots of text messages with customers like that is very, very difficult to ever get out of the business down the road, even though it's three to five years from now. I just recommend from day one, trying to create that delineation by having it where someone calls you and they're asking about their invoice, they're asking about, you know, their schedule, or they're asking about their payment information. You just simply say, here's the office's number and you hit pass it off. It's tempting at the beginning to just take it on, but then from then on, you will be the bottleneck. That customer will contact you every single time. So I think as long as you create that delineation on the estimator, you're gonna. You might get calls from me about following up about your estimate, but other than that, I'm going to hand everything back over to the office. Then usually that delineation is sufficient enough for them not to bother you.

And my quick question, we get an email with call notes from command center. Is there a way to include these call notes within the email? Instead of having to go into the Zooper app and access the customer and then call notes, just make a little more effortless. Thanks. Yes, this is possible. I saw this question this morning and I've already submitted a ticket in for your location. Madison. Those notes should be carrying across. There's a big reason why, again, in service autopilot, we can't do this. And that is in your. The email that notifies you of a command center call. We can't put those notes. Zooper can. So I'm checking in with Zooper today as to why that's not happening. And that will be fixed. That will 100%. I already know we have the tags and the code in the backend for this. So that way every time a call note is made, you get the email and it will simply tell you what was said in that call note instead of you having to go into zooper. So that is something that is not only possible, but actually works. And so I have communicated with them as to why that is not happening specifically in your account or if there's others too. So I will be looking into that today. I appreciate the feedback. Cool.

Okay. It's all I really had. I was in communication several owners yesterday, still with a massive amount of overload of work. So please listen to yesterday's mastermind about the steps to kind of deal with that.

The bottom line is.

During. During times when you're super, super busy, it also happens when you're super, super slow. It is the time when emotion starts to creep into decision making, when you're overwhelmed with work, when you're behind, when the weather's bad, when employees are leaving. There's, there's. That's a time to be emotional. It happens to all of us when you just have to talk to any of your customer, et cetera. The other time. The flip side of all of this is the. Another time that people get emotional is when there's not enough work coming in. And the thing about lawn care and landscaping is so difficult is we are so such a tight seasonal business. Which means when I say tight, I mean it goes from 0 to 60 very quickly when it comes to spring rush. And the same thing, the drop off, happens really fast in the fall. What that basically means is we basically, without regulating our emotions, we will always be in a state of either paranoia about not having enough work or constant feel like we're just chasing our tail trying to get work done all day long. And that is the reality of the industry, because you're either super busy or you don't have enough work coming in. And it's very binary based upon literally a couple weeks, it'll easily switch both directions. And so I was thinking about the other day. Even if last week, if you remember, there was that one time, one day I got off the phone, I think it was Thursday or Friday. I got under the mastermind and I said, I said, hey, sorry if I'm a little bit rattled. I just have to get off a phone call. And I had to kind of like be angry in this call to get my point across.

And so you'll notice that was the one time I made a mistake by making the live stream public instead of unlisted where only US Nation could see it. And so you have to realize, and when I look at stuff like that, I kind of try to analyze. I'm like, shame on me. Like I allowed emotion from a previous conversation to then affect my performance. And that can't happen. Like if an employee walks out on you, you cannot allow the next interaction with an employee to be negative. If a customer calls in and they're mad and they're freaking out at you, you can't allow the next interaction with the customer to be affected by that. And if you do, you got to step back and realize, like I did last week, like I, I allowed emotion to affect my performance. And shame on me. And it's always a matter of trying. We're just trying to become better. But ultimately emotion in business is going to lead to wrecking stuff up. And both the positives and the negatives, the highs and the lows. You being really, really high, go, go, go. Can wear out your team. It can cause good people to leave your employment because you're pushing so hard and you have so many ideas and just go, go, go, go. And your growth and you're chasing your tail and everyone's new, so you're making constant yellow slip. So when you're really, really high, that can really cause you to have emotions that then cause negative effects in the business. You making bad decisions, hiring the wrong people, taking on jobs you shouldn't allowing services, you shouldn't dealing with customer feedback incorrectly, switching to salary or dollars per hour instead of P4P. All of those things happen when emotions are high. When emotions are low, the inverse happens, right? We start to do things and say things that we don't really mean by, but it's the emotions that we get caught up in. And so it's not, I'm not really saying anything other than just to keep check of your emotions because it will always lead to lower performance when it comes to business. Obviously emotion is important as a human being, in my opinion, to stay alive and stay interested in living and live and breathe and want to excel and move forward. Emotions are great. Loving and having family and all the rest of it, that's important. But emotions and business will wreck you. It'll wreck you. Especially in an industry like this, where you're going to be having ups and downs in terms of seasonality, in terms of hiring, in terms of jobs, it's a lot of ups and downs. And so you have to really stay level. And so I look at, like, that situation. I hadn't really thought about this, but I think about that situation. I kind of beat myself up over it. Like, sick. Like, shame on you. You messed that one up. Then I have to look at other times I do well. And I said, what was different? So, like, the other day I got a call from two claims adjusters for insurance claims in different businesses and then in different locations, Augusta. And then I got a call from the police because that Michael Zimmerman guy that was on the phone called and said that we were harassing him. So got a call from the police. The media team accidentally left the phone number inside the video. We cut it out already. We cut all that stuff out, but it was up for a couple hours. Anyways. I had a phone call from the police. The. The police, the Royal Mountain police in Canada, calling me because of that video. All of that in about. About 15 minutes at the same time, which there was one franchisee that was hitting a really, really low that I was working on and things like that. So, like, all of that and the moment that someone walks in from command center says, and like, freaking out, and their eyes are just like, huge. And just like, the cops just called and they need you on the phone. Like, in that moment, I did a good job at just deescalating emotions and like, okay, that's fine. Take a message. I'll get back to them later. Like, you cannot allow emotions to dictate your day. You'll be on this constant evolution and roller coaster that will be just drive you nuts and you'll eventually quit. So the highs and the lows just have to be taken out.

I've taught all my employees to do estimates well, but I can't get anyone to mow without many callbacks. Yeah. So estimates is one of those things that if you simplify them enough and you're using the system, which. Tyler, I saw your. Your estimates the other day. They're phenomenal. Much better than last year. So great, great work. And it's probably because you've simplified everything to the point where you can create the system and employees can do the job. Estimates. That's great. Mowing is a physical skill that requires training of the motor skills that someone has, not just the brain or typing. And so sometimes it requires a little bit longer. And what I would do is I'd always be watching. Especially if you're growing your business and you have 10, 15 employees plus is tracking the average amount of time, the average tenor of all Your employees. So if someone started two days ago, someone started two months ago, someone started two years ago. You take the blended average of all that, it's probably like four months or whatever it is. Keep that number in your mind, because when that number goes low, you can expect higher callbacks. So if you're growing really quickly, typically the average tender time gets. Becomes very low. Like, I talked to someone last week, the average tenor time was four days, and they had, like, six or seven employees. And so, yeah, you're gonna have a lot of callbacks. And so sometimes during that time, you need to stop growth, and you need to. You need to work on increasing that tenor time. You need to make sure that you're training your employees, that you're out in the field working with them. You rotate who you're working with. You actually stop in on projects, show them things. If there is a callback, you actually do training. I know, Tyler, you've been doing meetings. Now, that's great. During those meetings, you zero in on things that you can train them on. And you might. It might mean, like, not growing as much, but if you can take those five or six employees and make them efficient and turn that three or four days to average 10 or into even two or three months, they'll become much more profitable and way less callbacks. Callbacks is almost always indicative of poor training, and poor training is almost always indicative of low tenor. Average low tenor. All right. And this is why when we were bleeding at commands or people leaving all the time, it was crushing us. Because as you're doing that, you. And this happens to everyone, all field workers, Same thing happens. If your top people are leaving. Your average tenor time is decreasing, decreasing, decreasing. And that. That means. Is now all that load falls on people with less tenor. That increases callbacks, that reduces errors. That reduces our. Increases. Sorry. Increases callbacks, increases errors, increases damage cases. All of that happens. And so you've got to realize, if you're growing quickly and you're. You are having employees leaving your tenor time just getting crushed. And if that. If that number is under a couple weeks, you really got to slow down and push jobs off. Do what we did talk about yesterday. Push the large projects off, focus on your crew and get them trained up.

I have found any person that knows how to handle a phone and can speak to a customer can do an estimate 100. As long as. As long as you're following the systems of simplification, right? So as long as you're using supplies and hours, as long as you're using Your estimate calculator, that's when it's 100 possible for anyone out in the field to do an estimate. And then typically how we do it is everyone in the field can do drive bys and then usually we have two or three that are good with people like their personality, they're good communication and they can do the in person ones. Right. So that works out great. If you're doing over the phone estimates, there shouldn't be a lot of drive bys unless it's for cleanups. And so yeah. So awesome. Thanks everyone. Have a great rest of your day. We got a question here for sure. I'm mowing this week with crew instead of estimates. Have four solid guys and building the tenor time which is around six weeks. Good, good work, Kyler. Yeah, I would say I kind of see a tipping point on that two month marker. Usually after a month or two is when they're hitting above base pay. So that kind of correlates to usually two pay periods. They're hitting base pay. That third and fourth pay period, which is that six and eight week period, they start hitting above base pay. So when the average tenor time is run above 2 months, most Mow dri skills can be learned much more efficiently. And so yeah, great job, Tyler. This is a hard time in the business when you're growing that fast. You have low tenure time and you got a lot of frontline people. I know you let a lot of people go too and those are probably your lowest tenured employees. So hopefully that will increase and become better. It's a matter of just training and grinding with them and realizing that even if you this year do 7, 60, 70,000amonth in revenue, that's better than trying to go for 100 right now in the fact that going for 100 means your tenor times going to get squashed. You're going to have tons of callbacks, more damage cases and you're just going to be stressed as I'll get out. So awesome. Have a great day everyone. We'll see you tomorrow.