Mike Minutes Mastermind 05/01/23

Happy Monday, Augusta Nation. Let's go get started. I got a couple cool announcements and then we'll jump into questions.

Let me first drop this into the Facebook group.

All right, so couple quick things.

Pull up my list here. First thing is testimonial stuff. So let me show you what we're trying to build here. So in everyone's email and on the Facebook group I posted this, there are two links. One is for your employees, one is for customers. Okay. Both of them are extremely important and will help us massively at Augusta if we can figure this out over the next few days. So let me walk you through what we're trying to build. So this is the one that I had you guys submit last week.

For just about Augusta Nation and about franchise opportunity. This is what we're trying to build for employees as well as for customers. I want to be able to see this for people across the country as customers and across the country as employees and us. Be able to share all of this on our careers page for our employees. Be able to share this on indeed Craigslist Facebook when you're trying to hire people, as well as put on all of our websites and we can do some really cool stuff with them like making where it's scrolling. And if we have hundreds of them, we can integrate these with. I've already worked on integrating with text reviews like from Google. So this is kind of what we're trying to build. But we need a lot of them. All right. The more of these, the better these features get with this plugin that we're using. So I want it to be when customers come to your website, they can literally see hundreds of reviews that are video from customers. And when employees want to work for you, you can see dozens, at least if not down the road, hundreds of other employees and reviewing working for Augusta Lawn Care. So when it comes to the employee one, if you have employees that have really changed their life, like just in general in terms of like stopping bad habits or like just improving themselves overall over the past year or two that they've been working for you, that's a great person to have someone that really enjoys P4P and maybe at the beginning had some problems the first month or two and then is now a really high performer is P4P. Ask them to talk about pay for performance. If you have a general manager or if you are an owner that went through the 3F program and you started working out in the field, I will probably personally message you if you don't leave a video for the for the employee one. This is extremely important because this is what we're all about, is the ability to be able to move up inside the company. And that's our biggest selling feature when it comes to working at Augusta Lawn Care. And so it is imperative that you share your story. If you start on the field working, pushing a lawnmower and you moved up to be an estimator or a general manager or now you own your own location, please, please, please make a video. I will highlight your videos at the top because that is extremely important for finding our team members. So again, there are two links. Let me just make sure we're all on the same page. I'll share this from the Facebook group.

I posted this yesterday. It's right here. So there's a link for employees and there's a link for customers. Okay. The customer one sent it to the customers that, you know, just like, rave about you. I don't care if it's your friends. I don't care if it's your family. I do not care. I need faces video.

And I know that I think it was Max put in here. What he the text that he's actually sending out to customers.

That'd be great. So I would love if we all could get just two customers. I don't care if one is your aunt and the other one's your grandparents. I don't care if everyone can get two. We'd have over 200 video reviews from customers. No one else can do that. We will crush this. And if all of us that have employees, which is like 95% of us, could get one, just one video I of an employee talking about working at Augusta Lawn Care.

We'D be off to the races. Even if you personally, as a solo operator, start out, you know, pulling weeds and mowing grass and you want to talk about the opportunities that you kind of got to move up and start growing your business, even that's okay to put in the employee. Just keep in mind this is built for people that are looking to work potentially at your location. So this is extremely important. I will keep talking about this till we all do it, because.

I really, really believe that this is going to be huge for us and it doesn't cost anyone anything. I'm paying for all the backend hosting and the subscription for these services, and then we'll put all the website design stuff to make this work really well.

So highly recommend if we can all do this for the next few days and just focus on it. Send a couple texts out to friends, family, the Customers that love you to death. And then also talk, talk to at least one or two employees and ask them to submit a review. This would be really, really big for all of us. So please, please, please take the time. I will harass everyone until this is done because I think this will be massive for us going forward.

One other thing. Someone had contact me about employees or general managers that mark jobs as complete, and then they just move on to the next job and they get caught a few days later. Especially if this is a gm.

Should you fire them? Basically, and that was the question. And so if someone's dishonest, honestly, there's not much you're going to be able to do to change that.

And so how they react when you catch them is. Is somewhat important. I would give them one shot, and that is like, give a really honest conversation, like you lied. That's not what we stand for. You're on thin ice. If that does not work, you should get rid of them very fast. If someone's not honest, they don't have good work ethic. Like, it's very.

The chances of you changing that is very low, especially if someone's in their 20s or 30s. Like, you're probably not going to change them a whole lot. So if someone's actually doing that and their integrity is low, I would probably move on from that person. And if your question is, well, like, who's going to do the work? Potentially you give them the warning call and in the same week you're hiring other people that potentially could fill their spot. So that way you could have a more smooth transition a week or two later if you need to let that person go. But that type of like, integrity and honesty, it does, usually does not change with the person. It's pretty inherent. By the time it comes, they come to you. The only time that can change sometimes is it's their first job because they just don't know what expected of an employee, employer, employee relationship. They don't ex. They don't know how breaks work. They don't know how any of that works. And so sometimes your first.

Their first job can be a little bit more. Be a little more forgiving and give them a little more grace. One of our three F members that started their own location, we were very close to firing within a few months of them getting hired simply because they just. It was their first job. They didn't understand a lot of what to do and not do inside of a business. And so we had some pretty stern talks and they turned things around. But usually if someone's 25, 30 years old and they're. They're doing things behind your back or have. Don't. Don't have honesty, integrity, likelihood of you being able to change that is slim to none. Honestly. Let's just. Let's just be honest. So cool. All right, let's jump into questions, but again, I cannot overemphasize the importance of those testimonial videos. If we can all just do two customer ones. And again, I don't care if it's your aunt, your grandma, your spouse. You could just dress up if you really wanted to, but that's. That would not be good because the people would search your name. So don't do that. But, like, we just need the videos. So please get those. At least two for all of us. That'd be 200. And then if we. Everyone has an employee, at least one team member that is willing to talk about how they got started with Augusta, what attracted them, what they like most about it. Talk about pay for performance. If they've moved up in the company, if they learn new things, if they've been able to make more money, all of those things. Please, please, please cannot overemphasize just how important this is. So I will harp on it until we all get it done. All right, let's go ahead and jump into.

Questions. Boom. How many we got today? 7.

Devin from Red Deer. Hey, my counties, do your locations bill monthly or weekly? We do monthly, mostly just to reduce invoice traffic. Once we switch to copilot, we potentially could change that simply because.

It'S a lot easier to do the cards and require cards on file. Devin from India, when servicing a lawn, do you guys move trampolines, tables, etcetera? We potentially would. We'd probably make sure the customer knows, like, we aren't responsible for any damage.

Which usually they don't like and they won't hire us. So do you recommend me paying off my 12k loan first or buying a truck? 15k for crazy growth mode? It really comes down to how much cash in addition to that you have if you paid off the 12,000 loan, and more importantly, if you're paying interest on that loan, if that interest is you're paying under 7% interest on that loan, I would probably just keep the loan and go, you know, buy the second truck. If you have the cash sitting there, though, and you're paying 8, 9, 10% interest, you might pay off the loan instead. Again, 10% interest, that's $1500 in a year. The question is buying the second truck. Are you going to make more than that in terms of interest? Likely. So even that still might push you in the direction of going getting the truck. Vince from Medicine Hat Scheduled estimates have been taking a significant amount of time for me during the day. I'm currently have 9 to 3pm availability and when that fills up it makes it difficult. Drive by estimates done. Have an average of 12 to 15 drive by estimates per weekday. Good problem to have. Clients seem to like to chat. Sometimes I'm too nice to cut the combo short and sometimes they're scheduled estimates all over my service area. So I spend a lot of time driving. Should I limit my scheduled estimate availability to a smaller window time so I can able so I can focus on drive pies? We are currently focused on growing our mowing list and the scheduled estimates are rarely mowing related and are often with clients who have more high maintenance. Thanks in advance.

I would say that.

I would probably reduce this down to like even if it was 9 to 1 or 9 to 2, give you a couple, just even a couple extra hours for drive bys will get you like four or five estimates done of drive bys just a couple more hours. So I would probably probably start off with limiting this down to like nine to one or nine to three. And then what will happen is instead of getting three or four or five a day, what will end up happening is you'll get exactly four or five a day because they'll book the entire all time frames of the day and they'll move on the next day and it'll become much more efficient that way. Instead of right now, let's just say you have three or four in person estimates. You might have a 9 o', clock, a 10 o', clock, a 1 o', clock, a 2 o' clock and a 3 o'. Clock. Like instead it'll be 9 o', clock, 10 o', clock, 11 o', clock, 12 o', clock. Boom. Right. So I would focus on that and then only change that if you're like more than four or five days booked out with someone availability to get an in person estimate. So yeah like I hate in person estimates. Even at the Bellingham shop I think we only do two days a week of in person and that's it. So I would either a do that where you go from nine to one or have two days a week where you do all of your in persons and everything else is drive bys all the other days of the week. Just personally how I would do it.

Like when I go in June, the first couple weeks when I don't have enough work I will probably like as soon as I get an estimate I'll get, I want, I just want it on the schedule. As we get busier I'll end up making it probably where there's three days a week I have, I'm. I'm able to do drive bys and the other days I don't have any or sorry in person and the other day that don't have any in person. Because those days where you don't have any in person is like when you're going to be training your team, you're going to be doing a ton of drive by estimates, you're going to be catching up and that's what really what the working GM model is about. Like hey, you're gonna have a couple days a week where you potentially might be doing a lot more estimates. But then other days are either working out in the field, training the team or getting work done yourself.

Chad from Valparaiso. I feel like my first round of EDDM was a waste of money. I sent 7,500 flyers out for spring cleanup mowing and I don't think the return cleared the investment. I wasn't sure how to even track this. I have another 7, 500 for mowing to send out but I'm worried if it may be another fail attempt. It's anywhere from 35 to 75 degrees here, so it's hard to judge by the weather. Should I pull the trigger since every door isn't an exact science? Or is my money better spent elsewhere? Here's the thing.

Once you've already printed, you've already kind of had. You already have like 40, 30 to 40% of the sunk cost of that piece of mail. That being said, you could do it next year too, right? Um, it's like if you watch Chuck's video from last week or week before last, they didn't ever do a direct mail. It just completely flopped. And then the next week they did another and like five times as many estimates came in. So it is law about timing. I'm not a huge fan of every door direct mail because of that and that especially when you're doing 7,500. Like I'd be more inclined to spread that out over the course of like three drops simply because I don't want to. I to don't want. I don't want to risk it being on a bad day in terms of weather. Especially when you can go anywhere from 35 degrees to 75 if it's raining at 36, 37 degrees. No one is thinking about lawn care. Nobody. So that'd probably be my recommendation. I'd wait probably a little bit longer. It's already. May I just make sure. I'd be looking at the forecast, right, Making sure that's good. But this is very, very common. You have hit and miss with every door direct mail. And that's why I'm not as big a fan of it.

In comparison to especially the size like 7, 500. You're looking at spending around 2, 500 probably by the time you have printing and the cost of the delivery that being sent on 7, 500 flyers to get those all delivered.

You think about like what, 12, $1300? 12 or 1300 bucks. So like it's like 12 or $1300 isn't so bad for 7500 flyers you want because you've already had the sunk cost of printing all these off, which is probably like 700 bucks, right? $800 or whatever it was. So you've kind of already sunk the money into it, like by a third. So like I will do every door direct mail when I go in June, but it's going to be probably four sets of a thousand that I'm going to put out and I won't go hard on it. I'm going to do mostly door knocking and Google and a little bit of Facebook. So yeah, every door we have just so hit and miss. And so if you have scarce dollars for marketing, I usually push people in the opposite direction because it can do great. But man, I've just seen sometimes where it's like literally you send a thousand, I get one or two calls. Ben Collins from Arnold. Hey Mike. Is there a way for employees to view previous pay periods or historical data clocking, clock out times, total hours, adjustments? Appears that since it's about to be a new month, all the data disappeared from the their view.

I'm guessing you're talking about P4P. Let me just pull it up in my app.

Timesheets.

Got you, got you, got you, got you, got you, got you. Okay, I'll look into this. Right now I have my guys demanding to see the historical information and saying they don't trust us and want to know why they don't care. See anything? The PDF report feature is only minimally helpful since it doesn't show everything. Mainly the clock in, clock out and break times. I'm afraid we will lose because they don't trust the P4P software first and foremost. If the employees are in that kind of position, you might not want them around in service all pot. You can't see your clock and clock out times. There's a lot of CRMs that don't allow people to see their clock in clockout times.

So they might need to like, just chill out for a little bit or you let them go because the bottom line is it's not your fault. And so obviously it's spring rush. They're probably working hard, etc. They're probably frustrated. I get it. But.

There'S no. You could literally show them on the. Send them a screenshot from the manager view right now. And so if people are threatening over stuff like this, I have, I don't have any tolerance for that personally. It's like, look, if you think we're, if we're trying to lie to you, I can just prove to you right now by screenshot this and sending to you that we're not. And then you're just going to keep harping on it, you're sorry, dude, you're out. So that's just kind of how I stand on things. But yeah, we will look at this and see if we can't make it where they can see further back. I think we might already have a ticket on this though, in terms of the development team, so I'll look into it. Let me make a note. One second.

Okay.

Yeah. What I would personally do in this situation is screenshot the manager view, show that you're not lying. Tell them that you've, you've asked that this could be changed and that we're working on it. But if they still have issues with that, I, I don't have a lot of tolerance for people that are like that, like that. They, they say you're, you're lying, you show them that you're not, and then they keep harping on it. It's like, look, you just got proven wrong, buddy. So sit down. So that's kind of how I am. This is actually in part because I did the same thing when I got my first job. I didn't know that taxes were supposed to be taken out and I wasn't. I, I questioned the taxes and.

My boss time was very, very forgiving and showed me how. And I felt like an idiot afterwards. But if people don't feel like an idiot after they, they call you out and then they're wrong, there's something wrong.

Chad from Valparaiso. When you have to push back your schedule due to inclement weather, do you push back the whole week into the weekend. Should I push the mowing route into the next day, a project day, and just get the project done on the weekend so as to not disturb the rest of the week? Yeah, it's just so dependent on how much time you're going to push off. Right. Like if you're just a day behind, I would definitely be trying to reschedule the project and move the mowing into that day. Potentially if you can't move the project day onto the mowing day when it's raining, if you can't do that, it seems like nothing can get done. I would say try to move the project off so you can get the mowing done sooner because you don't want to get out of rhythm too much too many days with your weekly and bi weekly mowing because then people start to cancel or they get mad. There's more customer service where if you make one call and just say hey Mr. Jones, it's raining like crazy today, can I move you off to Saturday? And you move one project and that gives you the ability to move 20 mowings into that day. That's typically what I would recommend. I try to keep mowing as close to the schedule as possible and I'd rather make one phone call to a customer and make them slightly unhappy where I know they're not going to cancel them either because the job's locked and loaded and ready to go. So I have no, no doubt of them canceling the job versus mowing is a little more fickle. And if I'm pushing a job off three days now, all of a sudden the next week I might be showing up four day, three, four days after the last service and they don't like that. So.

What is a normal commercial auto rate for one guy, one employee, one truck? I know it depends a lot on variables, but my first quote for basic truck coverage and liability was $350 a month. With just liability it was 250. I've been shopping around but just wanted to see if these rates are normal. Depends a lot on your state. Depends a lot on your age, average age of your drivers, your salary of your look of your, of your, your overall like salary going out to employees. That's usually how they actually determine the, the rate. It's not so much the size of the business, but how much you're paying in payroll because that's more indicative of how many people are driving the trucks. Lots of variables this, the type of truck, so how much it the it is, it's rated for in terms of weight. If you are young. I don't know who this is. Let me check one second.

Landon. Yeah. So, Landon, you're young, so you're probably gonna be pretty expensive just because you're younger on the policy if you're the only person. Oh, you have one guy, one employee, one truck. Yeah. So if you have, like a young guy working for you and your average age is like 19 or 20, like, that potentially could bring your rates up, too. So I don't think this is abhorrent in a little high at 250 for liability only, but I wouldn't say it's abhorrent. You do have some economies of scale as you get multiple trucks. It's not going to be like 250, 250, 250. It would be more like 250, 200, 170, 160. And then usually we get down to where the point where we're around less than 100 bucks per truck by the time you get more scale, like 8, 10 trucks, et cetera. So, for example, even my Mooresville location out in North Carolina, we put all the trucks under one insurance policy just for that reason. It's easier to billing and more importantly, get economy to scale. And then at the end of the month, we just do a journal entry between the different locations for that expense. We do that for 941s for payroll, as well as our general liability, auto. General liability and auto insurance because it's just so much easier to do under one policy. Get economies of scale. And then you split it up on the back end in QuickBooks just using a journal entry. All right, guys, have fantastic day. We'll see you.