Mike Minutes Mastermind 04/29/2024

Augusta Nation Hope you're doing good. I'm running off my mobile network so hopefully this is decent. It might get a little bit blurry, so I apologize if it does that. All right, let's go ahead, start a couple quick announcements. I made a post on the Facebook group about some of the results of the past three or four weeks of testing a whole bunch of different ads across about 20 locations throughout the US and Canada.

Really good results. We get dialing and dialing in. We've got to about $30 cost per lead. That was kind of our target. So I am going to make a video this coming weekend on.

Another done for you ads for Facebook and for Google Ads and just using our best practices. When I use the one the creative that worked the best for us, I can keep dialing in. I have a full time media buyer that we're I'm using to keep running these tests all the time. I'm using data from Copilot and.

The ads are running for the franchise to also use a list get way better of what's working, what's not testing a bunch of random stuff like lead magnets et cetera. So I've been really positive.

So this weekend I should have updated done view ads tutorials for Facebook and for Google using all of those learnings. And I will probably try to get our media buyer to make some as well. And then.

We just keep honing this and we're hiring another I'm hiring a full time graphic designer and half of their job is going to be just creating creative for ads. So kind of like the videos you saw on Friday that I posted on the Facebook group, those are pretty generic and just video but having text, having B roll, having variations of every single one of those will be super valuable. So probably another month out before she's up to speed and can do that for us. And so she'll be in the office of the media team but about half of her position will be help creating creative which will be super positive. We've just seen when we can test 3040 different pieces of creative to the top two or three every week and then keep recycling them and just making them better and better and better. It just like we have to get our cost per lead down so much further. So we had our cost per cross per lead started around between 50 and 70 but really 50 to $60 was our cost per lead starting out about three to four weeks ago and just kept honing it in and honing in. Last week we averaged between 29 and $34 cost per lead between Facebook and Google. And so I think that's probably like if we can get 30, I'm really happy. And obviously that changes a lot based upon timing of the year, location, etc. But I thought that was pretty healthy results and I will be sharing.

Those new tutorials this coming weekend.

All right.

Questions?

Okay, I got seven questions. Very good. First one is from oh, Mercy. Here we go. We have nicknames filling out. I'm guessing this is Matt Slaffey, not a coach. Matt, Salem, Oregon what are your thoughts on utilizing our nationwide presence and common systems to get contracts for nationwide companies, property management, facilities maintenance, etc. I could use, I could see some billing challenges, but maybe could you have an idea for a solution? Well, what I would probably do is just use that in your branding way more often, like in your ads. Sorry, not your branding, your ads. Mentioning that will in and of itself gain credibility in the eyes of property managers, facility managers, etc. In your market, you're hitting and in my opinion is like, hey, go after the residential customer. It's a likely that facility maintenance managers, property managers, etc. Are homeowners in your market and if they see a brand that is nationwide, they will probably call you for their regular job where they're looking for more reputable larger companies. Again, do I want to be, do I want to be competing in the commercial maintenance space where like the margins are so thin? Maybe, maybe not. But then also sometimes they get fed up with how lousy communication is with their current provider and they're willing to pay a premium price. So, you know, we had that recently at the local shop and it was like a property management company. I know we are double their price that they currently get charged.

But eventually, after years of them trying to go after lowest providers, they're like, oh, I think we still want to quote and they know we're still way more expensive. Okay, Matt's on a roll. Still not a coach. Matt from Salem, where you able to get us a deal? In the hotel room where the conference is, there's a link on blue collarsummit.com and I think they give us like 20 or 30 bucks off per. Per room. So you can use that link and it will give you the option to book directly there. Dylan works. Oh, mercy goodness. Which tattoo artist would you reckon on? My ten year Augusta tattoo. Feeling pretty committed. Oh man, that was fun. Okay, for those who have no idea what he's talking about, Lee brought this up on the C suite unfiltered podcast and I Talked about anytime fitness.

Really pressuring a lot of people to put tattoos on themselves when we were at owner training. Anyways. All right, Mr. Anonymous. All right, Mike. I have a question about building an app and weighing the pros and cons of fully funding it versus giving away partial ownership to the computer programmer. If you were 100% convinced of an app idea and that people would be interested in using the product, how would you structure the development costs? I have a computer programmer friend who is interested in taking on a side project. Would you pay him an hourly wage, ask him for a total price for development, take out a small loan, give him a percent of the profits generated for, offer him a share of the company's ownership? If three or four, how would you determine what percentage to go with?

As a related question, I'm curious about how you feel about partnership in general. How do you resolve the screens if you want a partnership? I believe you said you are in a 60 to 40 owner of Copilot. Yeah, so I'm now 90%. I bought out the other, about 30% of the other owner.

And that was in part because I, I went with number four, which is he had 40%. The challenging part is as you scale up, you realize the inadequacy of someone's skills and realize that they were good at a certain level, but they're not able to take the business to the next level. And so that's what happened in this case. And I'm still kind of searching for, for a technical person that I can give some equity to. I've already offered it to an individual because I do believe in the long term you need that. Like in the long term you need number three and four. But in the short term, most people don't. You're not, you're not offering anything of value. So up front, typically people are going to want one and two because they're guaranteed some sort of compensation and there's no promise of success. Once you've been successful, then you have a little bit more.

Sway with 3 and 4. So I would probably say 1 and 2 to get started. And then if it shows promise of success, it shows early traction. Doing three and four is eventually where you want to get to. Doing it early like I did is great. However, then you realize that this person is good for getting the business to say a million or 2 million, but they're not going to be able to take it to 10 or 20 million or beyond. Right. So whenever you give equity, it's difficult. You have hard conversations eventually if that person doesn't change and evolve and improve their skills. Right. So like I'm always trying to become better. Like in terms of like the partnership that happened with Patrick and I, he was the, he was the previous co founder or founder of Lawn Pro and we built on, on that. Like I came to the realization that technically he was good to build the company to say or 300 users, but he was never going to build it to tens of thousands like I want. And so that's a hard conversation but when done we'd handle it well and he's happy and I paid him out. And yes there's a lot of money to, to pull that band aid off but that was required very obvious to me as we rounded the end of the year last year. So I will, I'm a number one and two. I am. I will be moving to three and four because eventually you need someone that is technical in that role that has a piece to get seen in the game. But no one will take that role if there's no promise of earnings.

FO from Lafayette do you have a framework for thinking through the cost versus benefit of offering discounts to encourage higher acceptance rates? Alex from Mosey posted a recent video about retention and one of the items was concepts of unlockables or rewards for a customer staying longer. I was thinking about using this to keep customers on winter services longer, such as get a free bring fertilizer applications or stay on winter surfaces for at least half the season. I would nix the last part, but yeah, this is good, especially since our winter season is five and a half months long. Perhaps I'm overthinking, but I was thinking about how to approximate how much I could get away in an unlockable so I can make more revenue by offering unlockable. That's offering it.

I came up with an equation that factors in the additional revenue gained by offering the unlockable. Cost of offering the unlockable to everyone and the additional revenue from a percentage of customers paid for the offered discount if the unlockable were not offered. Do you have a simpler rule of thumb to go by? I see what you're saying. So one of the tracks, one of the five tracks we're going to be really honing in on is obviously winter services for the winter. And one thing that I think is a valuable offer is get a free spring cleanup. If you do winter services and you can simply say the cost of a spring cleanup averages at a thousand dollars, eight hundred dollars. Whatever it is, if you do winter services, it's going to cost you about that much and in the spring, we're going to come and do a free spring cleanup. The thing is, if they do winter services all winter long, there's a really good chance there's not a lot of winter of spring cleanup to be done. And you can just chip away at it all winter long. And so I think that's a really good offer being like, get a free spring cleanup and then you convert everyone into staying on with you, especially people that opt out, like, if they pause mowing, you resell them back into winter services. I think that's a good offer because I know that the actual downside to us is very low. Considering that if we have all winter to chip away at it, we probably won't have much winter services to be done. And you just be like, you could actually schedule it. You'd schedule it before your mowing season starts. Like, hey, you know, mowing season start ended great. Next five months, we're going to winter services. On this day, you're going to have free spring cleanup. And here's what's included. And you have to include like a ton of stuff of value that they're getting for free when you know that all winter you can be chipping away at that. So I really like that as an offer for winter services in terms of unlockables is like, hey, do all winter services. And if they bail on you and winter services, you don't have to offer the spring cleanup. And you can even throw extra stuff in the spring cleanup that is like to increase the value of it, like a free fertilizer, like a spring fertilizer, a weed control or weed whatever. Because really all you're trying to do is take the revenue that you would otherwise spend the spring cleanup and extrapolate it during your slow season. That's your goal. And so I'm willing to like give a free spring cleanup knowing that I'm probably only going to put a few hours extra of labor in the spring.

Because I will have time to dial it in all winter long. I think that's a pretty good offer. It's the one that I'll probably be focusing on when it comes to that track for a winter work.

Kyle Tarvin, when you own the Mooresville location, how much were you taking out of that location per month? How much are you currently taking out of Mount Vernon location and was its monthly revenue? At.

Mount Vernon's revenue is usually between 30.

Winter went down to 20, but still profitable, which is awesome. So I still had a distribution for Q1. I think I took $9,000 out like a little bit, but great. I give 50% of that back to the general manager and regional manager. Or like, sorry, I took $9,000. There was another, whatever $9,000 that was distributed them. So my cut was 9,000. In terms of revenue, they're between like 20 grand in slow season. During the busy season, they get above 50,000amonth in revenue at the Mount Vernon location, Mooresville, because they're much more temperate in temp. In weather, they're more consistent. It's like literally 30 to 50,000. Like it's a little tighter there. Their winters aren't as bad and it just does a consistent between five to $8,000 a month in profit. And so it's very stabilized because it's been around for four years. Same thing with Mount Vernon. So it's really nice when you have every single quarter you get distributions. That's like the ideal case scenario.

Your fourth year starts happening as a re. As a realistic goal for a owner that's not there. Fourth year is when you can take. It's just like it's profitable year round because you've been able to get enough customers to get winter services increased during the winter. That's usually how long I've seen it take for a remote owner and someone who has a general manager to still get distributions year round.

Travis from Jonesboro. How long did it take an average on average, for command center or Max doing otp? I made this ad last night, see attached and set the CTA to call now. But I'm wondering if this is a management expectation since the graphic says two minutes. New to Facebook ads, so any critiquing is welcome. Great, I'll look at it. I would be careful with this one. We ran some ads against this. The problem is this Facebook ads run 24 7. So the problem is if they call at night, Max isn't going to give them a quote yet. Eventually he will and he'll be able to sell the job on the phone. But right now, unless they get an operator during hours, they're not going to get the quote on the phone. So they call it 11pm they're not going to get the quote in two minutes. So I would say if you're going to make the CTA being click and get an estimate in two minutes, drive them to your website. If you're going to make it the CTA like we answer our phone 247 and show a picture of Max. That's when it's like the call now button. Fire, Fire. And some people will click on the button, literally, just to see if Max picks up the phone. And that's fine because your cost per click on those are much usually pretty cheap.

Oh, snap. I didn't look at it. I am so sorry. I didn't see if there was an added image on that one.

So sorry. Guys, one second. There's someone, I think, trying to talk to me. Give me one second. Give me one second.

Someone's at my door.

Answered the questions. Here we go. Give me one second. All right, I'm going to call it. Someone need to talk to me.