Mike Minutes Mastermind 04/29/2025

Hello, Augusta Nation. Hope you're doing amazing.

We are still on the turnaround trail. We had a last minute cancellation so we quickly pivoted and found someone else that actually were last year. Jack Mack Landscaping. Where we at? Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania.

So we're gonna do a follow up with him. So. Very good.

Next Monday is the day that you will be allowed to add credit cards to your instant pricing form. So I'll obviously send an email out next Monday. But just as a heads up, we've been testing at my locations making sure everything's good to go. It'll be very simple to add from the back end of the dashboard like you would for any other instant pricing form. Fill out the information. There'll be an extra box to check to add cards and then you will need to set up one one thing inside of your stripe account to make sure that's all being pulled over correctly and being entered into copilot. There'll be a tutorial. It'll take you all of five minutes. So be on the lookout for that one week from yesterday. So next Monday everyone will have access to that. And so there's quite a long, a long list of stuff I'm going through when it comes to instant pricing. We have several different delivery mechanisms like door hangers over the phone we have on the website form and we have it via QR code. And so I'm kind of going through those and then I'm also going through the different services. So we have like snow plowing, we have winter services. Those were done late last year. There's some optimizations we want to do to those, but those are done last year. Mowing has been the big focus and then getting it where we reduce the amount of friction in terms of getting cards on file. So after this one I want to do before next spring, I want to be able to get treatments also and optimizing the form a little bit more around credit cards and other areas. Things like door hangers would be super cool if we could somehow figure that out. So there's just like one, it's like, it's just like one service at a time, but also different verticals and channels. Using the, you know, regular door hangers over the phone, QR codes, the website, et cetera. So this is a big one in terms of just getting cards on file from the website since that's the third the, the most used channel for instant pricing. Unless you're doing a bunch of door hangers. If you're doing a bunch of door hangers, the QR codes are still going to be your. Your go to here. One second. Let me turn this temperature down a little bit. Boom. Boom.

So anyways, that's kind of like how I think about it. There is, like I said, multiple channels, multiple services. The, the eventual goal is almost all the services and all those different channels, instant pricing is available. And then you can kind of pick and choose which ones you want to use and which ones you are. Obviously you know what services you're using in your location. So let's go and jump in. I didn't look today. Let's see how many questions there are. Oh, there's only three. Okay, well, let's get started. Let me zoom in a little bit. One second.

Boom. First question. Mr. Anonymous, you said in your podcast with Tommy Mello that there's about an 80 to 20 split amongst US franchisees in regards to profits. Is there a dollar profit amount or a percentage profit amount that you could share that we could get into the top 20%? Yeah. Like right now it's right around that 200,000 in profit marker. Now sometimes if you're more of a.

Absentee owner, you're going to be sharing those profits with your GM team, etc. And this is why it's so important for me in terms of just the average revenue of our locations at Augusta. Because if, say, like right now, our average location, like 500,000, that means half of our locations are still not past 500,000 because they're in growth mode. And it typically does take three years to go from 0 to 500,000, enter profit mode and be much closer to actually getting that profitability. And so that's why, like the growth numbers, like the item 19, I sharing it for the public, fine, that's, that's fine. But I'm mostly interested in the fact that as that number gets back to like 600, 650, 700, I will, I will love the day when our average is around 750 to 800,000 because, and I don't anticipate like our current rate of growth of like 30% being sustainable long term as we continue to grow it. But I want it to be around that 750 to 800,000 because that would mean almost all of us are in profit mode and we're optimizing to that 200,000 in annual profits. And again, if you have multiple locations, you have GMs, you have regional manager, you have your team on the field, you might be giving 30 to 50% of your profits away of that 200,000, but nonetheless, the Location is creating that much profit. You can share some of it if needs be, but for an owner operator that's doing one location, they should be able to get that 750, 800,000, optimize for profit continually for a few years and get it to that 200,000 level. Just the vast majority of our locations have not even been open for three years. And so as we get that average passing 500,000, big win. Getting it to like 700 to 800,000 is really where I want it to be at because that's when I know the vast like it'll swap with what we're currently doing where like 80% of our owners will be able to achieve that versus 20% now. And that's mostly just because the size of the business. So. Good question. Just FYI, that podcast was recorded like six months ago.

So some of the. Some of the numbers and stuff in there are a little old papa pain. All right, attachment. All right, let's look at the attachment.

Share this tab instead. Okay. This is the instant price form. Oh, sorry. Okay. All right. One second. We have a question about it. It looks like. Let's see here. Did I share the screen? Yes. We want to push lawn treatments more because they're significantly more profit than mowing. Currently our web forms and web pages treat treatments as an afterthought. You don't even know a location offers them until you accept a mowing price and see an upsell. The issue is that many clients want treatments only if we create door hangers that link to a web form in the future tied to stripe for credit card collection. How can we improve this form? We should update our locations pages to reflect that. We sell treatments and mowing with equal priority or even prioritize treatments. I don't want to use space for one time cleanups on the web form. Should we replace cleanups with treatments and offer just mowing and treatments or perhaps add a third option? I think fewer options are better. We could include three upsells below the approved button to show clients what else we offer. I feel this needed needs improvement quickly so we can capitalize on our most profitable service and ensure treatments are not an afterthought on our web pages. Our web pages don't rank well for treatment or fertilizer keywords compared to other companies and franchises that focus on those. I noticed these this during keyword research. This isn't a huge issue because the treadmill and gym example. People don't search a gym with a treadmill near me. They search gym near me similarly, for weed control, people search lawn care, not weed control. Data shows it's not close. Yeah, you're 100% right on that. We found this even with the lawn care web design for companies that just do fertilizer, we still go after lawn care. The word this is great for us because we rank well for lawn care, but we can't fully capitalize on it because we do little to sell treatments through our online presence unless clients take the step. Yeah, so this is a great point. Like I said, I had mentioned earlier, instant pricing for treatments is actually pretty high on my radar. After we finish this whole getting the credit card from the web form, the next thing I'm thinking is instant pricing for treatments. That being said, the reason I haven't prioritized before mowing is because more than 95% of locations at Augusta do Mowing. About 30% right now do treatments. So it's still high on my radar, though, because I believe we can sell it really well. To your point, we're ranking so high, like, we're beating out other companies that, like, I keep seeing locations that don't do any treatments ranking so high for treatments in terms of people saying lawn care and then wanting treatments, it definitely is an opportunity. And if I can prove that opportunity, I think then it becomes valuable for us to go find training around getting certified, learning about chemicals more, etc. Never been a focus. It's really been get the mowing customer, upsell them. Other services and treatments have been kind of like an upsell, mostly because, like, it's almost 25 to 30% of Augusta do treatments. But it's certainly been high on my radar because I do think it's a really, really good opportunity given the fact that we're already ranking for people finding it. And I don't think that will change because to your point, people search lawn care even when they think about fertilization, weed control, moss control, like all. Anything to do with treatments. So it's definitely high on my radar, especially because if someone. This is my thought, if someone's at 500,000, instead of.

Even raising prices, what they might actually do is they have the opportunity to just add treatments to your existing customers. My bigger thing in this, probably, Ryan, you might be thinking about this too, is like when locations have multiple. When we have multiple locations in one spot, I really like the idea of starting, very simple getting started. But once you get like three, four locations in one area and they're all adjacent, having like one chemical truck and immediately being able to fill that truck because let's say each location has 200 mowing customers. You have three locations, that's six, 700 mowing customers, all in a pretty relatively close area. Now I might be willing to have, you know, do an upsell or a text message and out of that 600 customers immediately get 100 or 120 treatment customers like right off the rip.

That makes a lot of sense to get one truck and then just one treatment truck that can just do all of those. Because treatments take so short amount of time. You can do 30, 40 treatments in a day depending on your service area and your route radius. But like treatments spraying down a lawn for example might take 8 to 12 minutes. Mowing that lawn might take 25 to 30 minutes or 40 minutes for a one man crew. And so it's definitely something you can bang a ton of them out. The lifetime value of a treatments customer historically is lower because you can usually make about 300 to 420 on the high end treatment like revenue per year per customer. Now that depends if you're also would go up if you reseeding top dressing and dethatching and aeration of which most of our locations already do those. But when it comes to chemicals, usually let's say you average like a four to eight treatments per year. Usually you're going to make around that $300 per year marker. And so most of the time I see people when they try to add this service, it becomes a distraction too soon and they have you know, maybe 50, 60 people doing treatments and at six, at $3 a piece, you're making maybe 20 grand a year in treatment revenue. And if you just spend that time and energy focusing on selling like mulch installs, property cleanups and winter services, of which all of those have a higher than $300 annual customer value, usually better served. However, it is such an easy upsell for existing customers as well. As there's already so much residual SEO that we've been pulling in, especially in the past eight months I've been watching it and so this is certainly top of mind. That being said, Tori mentioned it on the roundtable and that is the redesign that we're doing. The site a big piece of that is being able to add more customization around the main form on mowing and adding different services in there. The current technology that we're using, where it unwraps the form.

Is limited to basically just those two and that's why it's just not optimal. So we want to make more customization in there and it'll be happening when we allow, when we redesign that whole thing. And that will allow us to be able to say, for example, like I don't really do property clamps or for some locations like very few, I don't do mowing. Then you might just have property cleanups and treatments. For example, you would actually forego the mowing option on the instant pricing form. So we're heading that direction. That's going to be that along with capturing the customer data throughout the entire form process is like my next stage after we roll out this next week's the. The Web. The web forms capturing credit cards. So yeah, definitely on my horizon and important especially because like we have been ranking so well on SEO for it. But also I really do believe like if I was starting like three or four locations together, I would probably ramp them all up above 100, 150 customers as I'm and then I get, as I get to 200 per location, I would probably start like one chemical truck and immediately be able to fill it with 100, 150 chemical clients. All of which is higher margin. So I like that a lot. Oh, I will add to that. If anyone here has any really good examples of instant pricing for chemicals, I would love to see it. I'm getting a whole bunch of examples. I'm synthesizing that right now. So if you have examples of instant pricing forms being done for chemicals, let me know. Trugreen has some stuff. They mostly lean on the phone.

And yeah, it's not great great. Like we can definitely improve that. So but I'm really thinking about instant pricing and how can we do that for treatments. So if anyone sees anything, I have visuals in quite a few, but if you see something that's really good, let me know. We use several examples like that for snow and people had sent me like several examples of, of some instant pricing for snow, snow plowing for residential. So if you, if you have an example of that and it looks really good, send it to franchisegustalongarservices.com I would love to see it as I start scoping out and looking throughout the next several months. But that will definitely be kind of my next thing when it comes to instant pricing forms in general. And then when we redesign the form, the ability to add which services you want in addition to just mowing and property cleanups will be definitely an option there.

Hey Mike, I was a Jameson. Hey Mike. I have a small YouTube channel, Jameson Vaughn if anyone is interested. And I was wondering if I was allowed to post One of my recorded coaching calls in there. As long as the coaches are alright with it. Thanks. Yeah, totally fine. Just make sure you tell the coach that they're getting recorded and you're going to put it on there. And I don't think, I don't have a problem with it. As long as they don't. Mr. Anonymous, do we have any data on the QR code, door hangers and how they are performing compared to the ones we used last year?

So the challenging part about last year is when they scan the QR code, it was.

It was essentially, you know, they go, they email you for example. I shouldn't say there was no QR code. They're emailing you. We can't track how many people like clicked, started to email you or started to fill out the form for example, or didn't get the text, didn't get the image to you, or couldn't spell Augusta long hair correctly or whatever. We can't track that click, we just can't. I do know that right now our form conversion of people that start like once they scan the QR code, about 35 to 38% of people actually submit the whole thing. It's pretty good. I see a lot of people doing instant pricing and they're getting usually between 5 if they're not doing good and 15 if they're doing a really good job on it. So I feel like we've optimized it pretty good.

In terms of just like simplification, get people through the form, don't add too much complexity. And so that's about the most insights in terms of other data, I just don't have anything to compare it to. So I could say like, yes, we're getting way more than last year. But like I also don't know last year how many people like tried to submit that form because like it was just an email. So in terms of like volume we're way up. Like it's almost double. But I also know more people are doing door hangers. I know that the conversion is up. Like a lot of other factors would play into that. So just giving you a raw number is kind of probably not super helpful. The percentage though of people that want like, want to accept around that 35 to 38% marker and that's pretty good. What I'm seeing across all the other forms that people are using. David, what is your advice for a new owner that suffered an injury requiring a 12 week recovery? The hope is that I'm able to get back to work sooner maybe eight weeks. The problem I'm seeing is trying to sell lawn service later in the season after the rush. So this like instant pricing, I'd be really leaning into this. Whether it be advertising your instant quote door hangers, like can you use a scooter? I don't know that. And actually Ryan, just submit a question. But he's a great example. He also had an injury and it set him back in terms of his new locations. But like, you know, almost forces you to like, okay, how do I go get someone else to distribute these? How do I make sure like I'm not, I don't have to be out. If I wasn't, if I couldn't be out in the field doing the work or walking, what would I have to do? And so for example, like if can you do a scooter to be able to do door hangers? If not, can you hire someone to go there? Can you get so many leads coming in by doing some ads, running some door hangers that like your full time job is driving around doing the upsells for property cleanups, mulch installs of mowing jobs that are coming in. So just because if you're physically, you're blocked unless you have no capital, if you had no capital, you could not do this. I would be trying to optimize for how do I get as many people to instant pricing form as possible, the door hangers and my website because. And then I would be trying to personally get enough upsells to keep myself busy just driving around doing those. But I'm going to be pushing people hard into instant pricing. So in terms of like let's assume now you don't have the capital to do marketing and the way that you're really surviving is getting the work done. The number one constraint now is labor. I got to get someone to go do the work as soon as possible. If that's literally what's putting food on the table, I've got to go find someone immediately to do that. Even if you have to overpay them for that short period of time to get help right away. But in the assumption that you already had a couple employees and that your main position was like growing the business in growth mode, I'm going to be pushing people hard instant pricing and I'm going to be trying to drive around if possible and do upsells into things like molten sales and property cleanups, those things of which I can do to drive by, drive by the house, look at the property, make my notes from there.

Alrighty.

That is all she wrote. Alright, like I said, next Monday instant pricing forms will be available on the dashboard to where you'll be able to add your credit cards or customers will add their credit cards. It'll go directly into Copilot. All the customer information as well as their credit card being attached directly inside their customer account so you can charge them, you can put them on. It's also tied into their customer portal so they'll be able to see that payment information directly inside of there tomorrow. There's some really cool updates also coming to the customer portal. A lot of fast follows from the feedback that was given from a few weeks back, so those will be really positive and super helpful for project based work as well when it comes to paid in full. So love you all. Hope you have a good one and we'll see you tomorrow. Take care.