Mike Minutes Mastermind 04/30/2024

Hope you're all doing amazing. Let's go ahead and get things kicked off here.

That's in Facebook.

Good stuff. All right, let's jump right into questions.

First up is Mr. Anonymous.

I want to move my franchise to a new location. What is all involved? Is there a cost to me to close one and reopen as another? Feel free to book a call with Lee.

There is usually a transfer fee in terms of you're actually moving because there's legal we have to redo everything. So just because Lee, he'll go over those details with you. You also want to make sure that the new location is available and what the parameters of that territory would be. But.

There is associated cost.

I forget exactly what it is though. But we can go over with you if you're considering that and make sure it is.

A good move for you. Nick from Nepean Hey Mike, two parts to this question. Oh wow. Long one. All right, first question is part one. You have told me in the past that sometimes the owner just needs to get out of the way for the business to run better. When he told first told me that it didn't fully sink in, but now it has. Lol. This clicked for me when I hired a part time office admin and I realized she was probably taking about 15 hours of work off my plate per week, but only working 10 hours a week. It wasn't because. It wasn't because it was that much work, but it was just sucking so much of my time because I was horribly inefficient, bouncing between a million things. I imagine I would see a similar effect delegating, estimating operations, etc. The concept being someone that is fully focused on a role can likely perform better than me because their attention will be 100% focused on that role. Am I correct in that assumption? You are correct. You also in order to delegate all of these tasks to where someone is focused solely on it costs a lot of money.

To have. Because. Because when you're starting out these are. These are overhead positions. So that's why a lot of times people will look at companies that are doing 2 to 3 million in revenue and be like oh man, if I just get there, I could have like someone doing estimating someone in the project management, someone doing the scheduling. You're right. At that size of business, if you try to do that too early, you will literally never make profit.

That being said, I'm currently trying to delegate operations, scheduling, making sure the guys are set up for the day, etc. And I'm really Struggling to hand it off. My gut feeling is I'm trying to over systematize. That is dummy proof. But at a certain point I just need to expect my operations manager to think for himself and figure it out. How do you draw the line between it being my responsibility to train the manager, have the systems in place, etc. Vs hiring just recording the manager to have critical thinking ability? Yeah, you can, you can systematize till you're blue in the face but if someone doesn't have critical thinking skills and a good head on their shoulders, you, you will literally have to 5x the training. There's plenty of people that literally say like the best form of training and systems is hire a good person that can think through things and make good decisions. So much of training and systematization and processes and SOPs are reduced and eliminated and you just get someone who can think critically. The only positions where I think that you really have to systematize it to bring down the level of skill required is frontline team members that are doing more routinized work. When it comes to any position where there is large variety and there's large levels of differentiation between how things should be handled, that's when you need someone that can think critically. And I'm hiring them for that skill because they'll figure out what to do that's right.

In each decision making scenario. Like if they know how to run a business, they understand numbers and they understand how to lead people, they'll make good high end decisions, they'll make good project management decisions, etc. I won't have to put in a notebook like okay, if there are four yards of material and I'm going to have three yards left over, I'm not going to dump it out at the job website. I'm going to keep it in the trailer. Like you could create like a book or just hire a good person that thinks had a good head on their shoulders.

After how long do you determine that this manager is simply not cut out for it.

Man. So it's difficult. It's also based on the time of year when I would judge a gm. So in my opinion, if they are starting from scratch, three months. I'll give them three months to kind of show themselves. If they are inheriting a company that needs a turnaround, like if the location is struggling, I'm probably getting them six to 12 months because they have debt. I like when I say debt I mean like they have cultural debt, they have financial like issues that they have to solve. And so I'M going to give them a longer window of time. But there's never been a person that I've been like critically disappointed with and then somehow they turn things around and become like an A player. There's been people where it's like they're okay. Like never a time where it's like very obvious and it changes to positive. So traditionally being faster on the draw in terms of letting them go is going to cause less damage financially. And just like your time scheduling is the main thing I'm struggling with. If that hands helps answer your question. Yeah. So like if I was you at your size, Nick, I would be like, okay, you're doing 800,000 revenue. That's right around the time when you can have someone that is in the office almost like pretty much full time. I would be doing everything possible to make sure that person does all your scheduling, as much of the all this other stuff as possible. If they're only working 15 hours a week or 10 hours a week, I'd be asking like, how can I get them to be more like 20 or 30 hours a week? How can you get them full time? And taking these things off your plate, you can make an office person do scheduling 100%. Like Liz did all of this stuff for me before.

Back in the day, like when she was in the, in the office full time, she did all the scheduling, she did all the invoicing, she did all like all that sort of thing. You are going to make a bottleneck for the business. Yes, that is 100% true. And that's why I just say once you cross 800,000, use the systems of command center as your insurance policy, that if something happens to the person that is now the bottleneck for your business, you can short term move things over to command center while you're finding someone to train them on all these things that you have now put on someone else. So again, that's why I always say like after the business gets to a certain size and you have an office person, following the systems is more a matter of insurance. So that if you need to, you could throw it at command center instead of this person leaving and they're doing your scheduling, your invoicing, your billing, your email management, everything, your cookbooks, they're doing all this stuff for you and all of a sudden now they're gone. That's when you want to use it as an insurance policy. Part 2. You may recall my question I asked you a few months, a couple months ago about hiring outside manager versus promoting from my guys that has been with me for four years. Ryan in the end I wasn't able to get the new manager on board. He said his current company would crumble if he left and he didn't want to do that. So I promoted Ryan.

To be my operations manager, largely due to the fact that he told me he needed to make significantly more money this year or he was leaving. Ryan is very good in the field, knowledgeable about the landscaping industry etc, but it's always in the back of my mind that he may not be the best fit for a managerial role. There's nothing particularly wrong with him, he just doesn't have that very intense go getter attitude you want in a gm. At the time I figured I would still give him a shot. We're about two weeks into the season now. My gut is telling me he is simply not at cut out for the role. This is where it comes back to my first question. I am aware that my leadership and delegation skills need lots of work and that is playing a large role in him not excelling in this position right away. However, I have a feeling that if someone was truly a right fit for this role, they would take it and run with it, be hungry to learn and take off my plate as soon as possible. Even if I hadn't trained them 100% perfectly. I know the outside hire I was trying to get had this attitude so it makes it hard to accept subpar performance when I'm not aware of what is out there. I'm all I've also.

Hired new team members this year that are have already done for a much better attitude than Ryan. My gut is telling me I need to part ways with Ryan and let him know he'll need to continue his career somewhere else. I know you probably need more context, but based on what I'm telling you and your experience, what is the right call? His father passed away about a month ago which makes this a tough, very tough decision and I feel horrible letting him go. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt that this is affecting him, but the reality is that this has always been his attitude and his new pay skill is pretty high. So I can't let subpar performance go on for too long.

If you think you have a better replacement already inside the company, this makes the decision a lot easier. If you don't have a replacement for this person that is going to be better, that makes this more difficult. I would say this. Try not to let this there's one line in here, your gut part and then there is nothing particularly wrong with him. So that's where I would say he might just be different than you. And I don't really care if someone's different than me. I just want to care about the results. And this is where having lagging indicators of success is important, because you are currently judging him based upon leading indicators of being hungry, like going after being that hungry. Like, what if just saying this is a possibility. What if he's not that way and this location is way more profitable with someone that's more operationally driven and the guys connect with that isn't hungry and driving and pushing and trying to get the next job? Not saying that's the case, but a lot of times I've seen locations that are mature, not new locations or locations that are growing, but locations in profit mode. Sometimes having a driving, entrepreneurial person at the front actually creates more chaos than anything and reduces profits.

If a location is in profit mode, in other words, they are at capacity, they are not trying to grow, they're not spending tons of money on marketing, they are actively raising prices when they hit capacity. If they're doing those things I've seen in my own locations, sometimes having a less entrepreneurial GM is a good thing because they're going to stick around for a long time. If you look at some of the things you mentioned here, like the hungry person trying to take stuff off your plate, 100%, taking and running with it, they're probably going to leave you within a couple of years to go start their own business, right? So if you look at like my best GMs, yes, they were great getting started, getting off the ground, but they ended up wanting to go start their own thing, right? So eventually, once you get a location in profit mode, sometimes having someone that's like, hey, I'm not going to start my own thing, I'm not entrepreneurial, but I'll manage this bad boy, then it's just a matter of like, use metrics instead of your gut feeling to.

Rank their performance. And so that's when it's like, look at the numbers, like profit margin, close ratio, like how long are guys staying with you? Like tenor. Use those benchmarks as a way to judge them instead of things like your gut or like, they don't have like the it factor because they might just be different than you. And what you did is fantastic. You went from zero to 800,000 or a million or whatever. But once you get that location, sometimes a different skill set will actually be more profitable and that skill set might be less entrepreneurial and that is different than you. Just a thought, and I'm not saying anything in regards to this specific employee.

But it is a matter of I've. I've seen this in my own locations. Like, the most profitable ones are sometimes less entrepreneurial GMs because they stay there longer, the guys connect with them better. And even though they will never be able to grow a location from 0, never be able to door hangers or sell or whatever, I just need them to run this location and manage it well. I don't need to do marketing, I don't need to do door hangers. It's in profit mode. So I wouldn't say it's like a universal statement. I would just say use that as like a balance.