Mike Minutes Mastermind 05/02/2023

And we're live. All right, let's go ahead and kick things off. Let me make sure.

I put this in the Facebook group real quick. One second.

I want to go over something real quick before I jump in.

If you are past year two in terms of your second spring rush and you have not yet figured out what marketing mediums in your market are sort of the highlight, that would be my main priority and focus. Obviously, inside of Augusta, you're going to hear, you're going to talk to some owners and one thing will crush it for them. You try it out. Doesn't work. Something they say it doesn't work for you, for them, you try it out in your market. Works great. This is why localized marketing is something that big brands typically don't do well is because they have to paint a very fine art with a massive paintbrush. And that is why.

You'Ll typically see these brands when it comes to location based, that they'll have pockets where there's a lot of different locations and others there's nothing. And a lot of it's because they're taking the same marketing and applying across the board. This is why typically most franchises, you have a 2 to 4% unless you're like subway, it's like 8% or 10% marketing fund. And then they take that national campaign and they run TV ads, billboards, radio, banner ads. They do all of that with a very wide brush at any time. Fitness, we have to pay $600 per month towards an ad spend. I'm glad it's a fixed fee and not a percentage. But still, the fact of the matter is those marketing dollars, I don't get any leads from.0. I literally have never got a lead from. I'm sure there's been awareness that people walk in the door during like a big sale in January caused from my over the course of a whole year paying $600. I'm sure there's some of that, but I have never got a single direct lead from the $600 a month I spend. And I've been doing that for five years. So it's because it's very, very wide. It's more awareness campaigns. And the reason we don't do that at Gusta is because I'm very aware that your localized market is very different than the one even 10, 20 miles away from you. And one thing that works for them might not work for you. And the thing that works best for you might not work for them at all. And so the whole preoccupation of a new location should be to figure out what works well in their market. Taking all the tools that are given done for you, ads, the door hangers, yard signs, door knocking, all the different things and then applying those and figure out what works well in the market. This is for new locations. You will see. When I get to North Carolina in June, the first thing I will be doing is testing every single thing in the first week to figure out what's working well. And I will just go ham on it the next three weeks. I will not do anything else but that one thing over and over and over and over again. And so if you haven't figured out what that is in your market and you're past your second spring rush, please, that needs to be your preoccupation with your, your coach on your monthly coaching calls. That's what you should be talking about. What are you testing, what's working, what are you tracking in your first year? A lot of that is you figuring things out. But if you have not figured that out, you need to. And for some people, one click estimate emails is their go to and what they should be focused on is simply getting as many people into their database as possible using whatever means possible, whether that be a free PDF on a Facebook ad, whether it be doing some sort of a trade show and getting a thousand emails. They just need as many emails as possible because one emails are crushing it for them. And they know if they get a thousand people in their database, they, they're 100 of them, they'll be able to do service for them next year. And so getting people simply into their contact database is the strategy in order to be able to really monopolize on one click estimate emails other people, it's door knocking. For other people, it's door hangers. For other people, it's yard signs that crush it. You've got to figure out what that is. I think for 99% of people, they figure out what that is in their second spring rush most often because now they are getting a lot more brand awareness already. And so it starts to be more sticky on whatever they spend money on compared to your first year where you, you have to get over the fact that no one's ever seen your truck, they've never seen your brand, they don't know what Augusta is. And that is overcome usually in your second spring rush. So please, that needs to be your preoccupation. You will see what I do when I get to North Carolina. Never been there before. I probably just drive around the place several times. I'll try like five different types of marketing. I'll do Google Ads, I'll do Facebook, I'll probably do next door, I'll do every door direct mail, I'll do yard signs and I'll do door hangers and I'll do door knocking on all within the matter of the first week and simply figure out which one I can double down on the rest of the month. So yeah, just a bit of a my 2 cents there. All right, let's share the screen. Hop into.

Here.

Devin from Sheridan. Where do you recommend buying the aerator and power rake straight out or renting it? I find renting is annoying because of pickoff and drop off. I would personally rent something until you're using it quite often. Ideally with aeration and power raking, you can stack a whole bunch of customers on one day, rent it, and yes, it takes you an extra hour to take it to the shop to drop it back off at the end of the day. That's a whole lot cheaper than having it sit in your shop doing nothing for 360 days out of the year. So personally, if you can, if you can use that piece of equipment, stack it up and use it for three or four days a year, I'd highly recommend doing that. If you cannot do that and you're using it for 10, 15, 20 days a year, that's when I'd potentially start thinking about buying a lot of times your rental place too, that you can get pretty good deals from used rental equipment. But just keep in mind they've been usually beat up pretty good.

Kyle Tarvin these initial mows have been an absolute nightmare to schedule around. You never know if they'll take 0.51 or 2 budget hours to complete. How do you go about making sure the crew aren't overloaded? If they have two or three initial modes plus their regular mode on the schedule, we talk about training and that is you have to accommodate for this fact during spring rush. In terms of budgeted hours capacity, I would recommend not scheduling within 80% of your budget hour capacity when you're booking yourself out two, three, four weeks because it might look like you are doing just fine two and three weeks from now. But by the time two or three weeks rolls around, you've accepted five or ten more mowing jobs and the ones that are now getting on the schedule are all overgrown. So you guys gotta, you gotta figure out, okay, what times of the year when people are calling for mowing, are they always overgrown? In our market, it's like mid April till the end of June. If anyone calls during that period of time, you can almost guarantee it's overgrown. Because they're calling to get new service set up, it means they didn't get set up service in for us February and March. Therefore, if they're calling in late April, May or beginning of June, guarantee that lawn's completely overgrown. So you've got to account for that by not putting as many budget hours on as you book your schedule. She's like, well, I'm only two weeks booked out, but if you look your third week, you're already 80% booked out. I would consider that completely booked. That's why in copilot, when you start booking jobs out into the future, as soon as you hit yellow, 80% capacity, we're going to start making those yellow on the graph. Simply because I want you to double think about the fact that, hey, if I'm three weeks booked out and I have recurring mows being added, plus I have all these mows this time of year are overgrown. Typically, you've got to really rethink that schedule.

Terleck, Boone's Creek, Tennessee so I have a situation. I'm not sure if I did the right thing. My wife has been helping me send quotes off and somehow she missed some notes or something and sent a mulch quote with practically no budget hours included. It wasn't a big, big project. I think roughly $150 for the original quote. The customer accepted it right away. And when I saw the quote, I knew right away something was off. And because it seemed so low and I had just went ahead and estimated the job.

We sent an email saying that we apologized, but we had missed some notes in the estimate and needed to make send him a new quote. He declined the new quote right away. He's one of our mowing customers. Should I just eat the mistake or should I still try to contact and rectify the situation by saying we can do the original quote? I don't know if I'm going to get a bad review because of sending a new quote right away. After accepted the lower price one, I would just call him. A lot of these sort of things can be resolved with contact. It sounds like this is a happy mowing customer. Otherwise I would call him and just be honest, like, hey, I just want to connect with you because I saw you, you declined the second quote and I just wanted to make sure that you don't feel we're trying to pull one over in you. That's definitely not what happened. You're valuable customers. We really appreciate you and I just want to personally apologize. I'm not trying to sell you the quote. I'm not trying to sell you the new job. I just want to make sure that you know that I clean the air and apologize for the fact that I made mistake on the estimate. And I really do apologize. They're either a gonna say, no worries, totally fine. The new price a little bit higher than what we were hoping to spend. I'll get back to you if, you know, if we can't find anything cheaper, great, no problem. Or it's, hey, I appreciate that a lot. Yeah, you kind of ticked me off a little bit that you change it. But I appreciate you calling and why don't we go ahead and just get it on the schedule? Right. So I would not go back to your original quote. I don't think that's the right move here. I think it is. Call the customer. Especially if you're booked out like crazy busy right now. I would not go back to the original quote. If. If it's like, you know, a couple hundred bucks you're losing out on and you don't have any other work otherwise that's a different conversation. But if you're really booked and you're crazy busy, this might be something you just, you just gotta call them. Like communication is so important. I guarantee you that call end well whether it be a job on the schedule or at least clearing the air with the customer to the point where they will not leave a negative review. I almost guarantee it. I would put money on it. I would bet a hundred dollars. I'll bet you have a hundred dollars, Terrell, that you could make that call. It ends positively. Even if they say no, you clear the air with them. Or B, they just like, yeah, the price was just too much for the second one. No worries. No sweat. We totally get it. You got to run a business.

Hey Mike, I ordered 3K mailers from Vistaprint and most of them have the number cut off. Some do not. The preview looked good when I ordered them. Do you have a support email for them? You should be able to find that on the Pro shop. They will. They will correct this. By the way, Vista prints pretty good about this. Let me just make sure I have this. Let's log into Pro Shop. I think the number's on here. If not.

I think it's a separate number. Give me one second here.

There it is. Okay. Support. Yeah, in the top right hand corner of Pro Shop you'll see a support tab. You click on that, you're going to See an email, a phone number and those are dedicated for the pro shop so definitely reach out to there.

Oh, I should have shared this tab right here. So it's top right hand corner right here. Support and you'll see all their information right here and specifically for the pro shop so they will have direct access to our account.

I dropped my truck off to get fixed yesterday. I reserved a U Haul truck but then I got there there was no truck. Now it's day two and still no truck. I won't get my truck back until late tomorrow. Should I just keep clients updated and let them know I'm not able to perform the work right now?

To be perfectly honest, I would go find a truck. There's trucks out there. Go to Enterprise, there's other rental companies out there. U Haul's not the only place you find a truck. You make it happen. All the area codes in Grand island are 308 and the 3 is cut off. Do you think I should wait on sending already purchased routes for tomorrow? You should be able to edit your every door, direct mail and 99 time. Honestly, they do not care at the post office. Personally, personal. They do not care about that date that is on that mail on that thing. You could contact them and confirm that. I would do that if I was you. Go to your, your local place. Hey, I got these printed. They're. They made a mistake on them. Is the date an issue? I guarantee you they're not. They don't care. They just want you to make sure they paid. And there might even be something when you check on every door direct mail it has to be within like 30 days of that date and they're not sticklers on that date to my recollection. I would triple check that and then yes, contact Vistaprint and they should be able to get that corrected for you.

Alright guys, have a fantastic Tuesday. We'll see you tomorrow. Take care.