Mike Minutes Mastermind 05/02/2024

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to another Mike Minutes Mastermind, also known as the 3M. You probably get your text messages way late. I had to go live right away. Sorry. Just have meeting stacked today, so I apologize. You're probably watching the recording. Let me go ahead and drop it into Facebook. Real quick, though, A couple quick announcements before we get started.

Oh, come on. All right, Here we go. 3M. May 2, 2024. Boom, boom, boom. All right. And we are there. Okay, couple quick announcements. Numero uno.

This weekend, hopefully I will get the updated done for you. Ads for Google Ads and Facebook ads.

We've been doing a ton of testing. I made a post on this Facebook group, a ton of testing over the past three, four weeks. Pretty confident since we've been able to slowly whittle down our customer acquisition costs down to about 30 to $40. I say customer acquisition cost because we're driving them the instant quote, and we usually only get a quote someone's accepting. So that's really good. I do believe if you do the what I talk about on the weekend, you'll probably start off more like 80, because that's where we started off, almost across all the locations between 80 and 100. And then we just kept whittling it down and improving it and changing stuff. And you take your best performers. So I will have those. Those. This weekend, there's gonna be three different videos. One's gonna be for Google Ads. Another one is going to be for Facebook using your Pixel, and then another one is gonna be using Facebook forms. Google Facebook Facebook forms. Facebook lead forms. There you go.

Those are the three videos I'll be posting. And then also.

Hopefully this weekend, if not early next week, Zach is working on a project where in Canva, you'll be able to get all of your pictures for the. For any Facebook ad, and then just change the text to say, like, attention. And then you'll be able to fill in the gap. Because what we're seeing is what really performs well is when the creative says, attention, Wacom attention. El Paso attention. Rockport attention. You know, Littleton, whatever. Your territory is like saying that in the creative works really good along with in the text. So we are making a Canva Canva.

Project that you'll be able to click on. It'll replicate inside of your account. You'll then be able to change the pictures behind and then add your cine, and it'll keep the same design with it, which has like a. The grunge look to it. It says instant quote on it. Has a really cool design. So that is all coming out very soon. I'm very, very excited about that. Again, I would anticipate between 80 and $100 is more like what you're going to be getting for each acquisition position. And then if you do what I talk about in the videos, which is like really pay attention to it. I'm look, I look at our, our lead flow every single day and we're optimizing, tweaking. Okay, this one's 150 cost per lead. Okay, scrap that. This one's 15. Okay, let's, let's do more of that and create five variations that are similar to it. So it takes a lot of work. But man, it is crushing right now because if you take one that's working, instead of being like, oh, I should put more money into it, instead of doing that, just like make five more variations that are similar to it.

It's been working very, very, very well. So I'm looking forward to sharing that with you. Do I think it's the magic bull for every location? No, there are some locations where still we can't get it below like 40, 50 bucks, which is still not horrible. Honestly, I would pay $50 for a lead every day of the week if I knew that I could close. The vast majority of them now is in growth mode. Let's go. If I can get a customer for under $100, I'm usually just pumping money into that system. But I can't. I don't want to be paying three or four hundred dollars. It takes me too long to get to break even where I recoup the cost of that investment and I just don't want to touch it. It just takes too long. Like if a customer churns within three, four, five months, I would literally be losing money due to the cost, customer acquisition cost. So.

Very good. I had another announcement, the email last night. We updated the DKIM records yesterday. I learned way too much about this sort of garbage. But we should be good to go. If you have problems with Yahoo, let me know. But I have been testing even this morning. Sending. I made a bunch of Yahoo accounts last night while we were testing. So it's been working. I just use my franchise email and it's been going through just fine. So you know there's always gonna be one off URLs and domains that will randomly have a really high spam one offs. But we saw like a probably a 3 to 5 Xing of Mana blocking over the last few days. Contacted Google. Long story short, across all Google workspace, they're updating the dkim this weekend likely will be an instant change. So instead what we did last night, due to a manual change, we did. We did take the email down last night for a little bit, but it was in the middle of the night. I don't think it affected anybody. I was monitoring it the whole time. So we should be in the clear. But if you have massive problems today, please let me know because I will literally drill into your specific account. If you're getting like five or 10, like we have been people getting like five or 10 blocked emails a day, that should be happening that much. Especially if you're sending it from like Gmail. Shouldn't be happening like that. So. All right.

Questions. Let's see what we got here.

One second. All right.

Boom. Present share screen. There we go.

All right. Make sure I had everything here.

Very good. Okay, very good. First up, Nick from Napine. Thanks for your answer to my question the other day. I think you're right about my gut feeling being about the fact that he is not like me. You make a great point about someone with different skill sets potentially being the right fit. The goal is essentially split the GM role between me and him, okay. With my time being spent solely on sales, marketing and tracking finances etc while what metrics would you be tracking? His performance give him as a target to aim for by jobs, produce, gross profit, efficiency score, all of the above. If he's just focusing mostly on production like and like managing the crew, which is operations essentially. Efficiency score is a good one and your profit's a good one. Those are two really good metrics. If he's just doing operations to be able to look at two, how would you determine how much you would work in the field? I can't afford to have him as strictly overhead. His main duties will be scheduling and being the one the guys call on when the defy to put out. He'll be scheduling, managing plus or negative nine employees, two to three crews, plus two to three project crews. You mentioned Liz used to your scheduling any. Oh, sorry. I would have an honest conversation with him, be like, hey, here's the numbers. I can't afford to have you doing full time just managing like scheduling, you know, know I'm doing all the sales, I'm doing all the other admin stuff. What do you think is reasonable? 20 budget hours, 25 budget hours. What's the bench mark? And just be like, okay, as we grow, if we get 12 employees, that number will go down. If we get 15 employees it'll go down to this and eventually like at 15 employees, probably 20 employees, probably more like 20 employees you're going to have like where just scheduling and managing them is like a full time job if they're not doing any other admin work.

You mentioned Liz used to do your scheduling. Any advice or system you can recommend off the top of your head, you guys used, I would say just everything in terms of scheduling should be recorded. So that way if someone goes down, someone else can pick up right where they left off. So knowing exactly how you want scheduling done for every day of the week, I'd probably have a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday scheduling video. So people kind of know like generally where you're looking for routes, et cetera. So if you get hit by a bus or they get hit by a bus, you can pick off right where they left and. And not me. Miss a beat. Is scheduling one of those things? I have to accept it's always going to be a little chaotic. I've been trying to create a perfect system and it seems like it comes back to simply needing someone with a head on their shoulders to stay on top of it. Yeah, I would say like scheduling is one of those things that is, there's a lot of knowledge.

Tribal knowledge that is needed in terms of which crew members are efficient, which crew members like certain routes, what equipment do you have, what trucks you can simplify is like the easiest way to create a system around this. Like simplify your truck setup, simplify your equipment setup so they're not juggling those. That's one of the biggest, hardest things to work with scheduling is your tools and equipment. Because there's like a whole nother layer of like what you can schedule. It's not like who has the skills and who has, has like the truck. It's like what tools are we juggling around between different trucks. Like which mowers need to go on certain properties that gets really chaotic. So I just focus on the simplicity, simplicity of it. Because as dealing with humans, whether it be customers or employees, there's always gonna be so much variation. Your point is valid and that is like having someone with a head, head on their shoulders is gonna be the best way to make sure scheduling goes smoothly. But reducing variation of equipment and trucks massively will help your scheduling in terms of just making it easier.

Chad from Valparais, Indiana, does CC have a breakdown of individual charters, for example, explaining what customer resolutions took place, what contact forms and web chats took place? I turned everything off except for answering income calls. But my CC bill is still quite large. You can contact them in your invoice. It provides breaks it all down of where the things are going. But if you have a specific question about it, just respond back to that email and they can give you more details or you know, give you any sort of information you might need.

There are times sometimes where like a customer will call in or there'll be something where it's like a very gray area. Like this isn't really invoicing and billing, but it becomes a big issue and they have to handle it and they might throw it into like an incorrect.

What'S it called, categorization. So that's why sometimes even if you have something turned off, there'll be a small charge in there. It's simply because someone was like, hey, this is more of a xyz like if customer, an employee calls in freaking out about something and they're handling it or I guess wouldn't be calls. But if they're emailing, whatever it is, sometimes it does get those little things that are gray would get miscategorized. But always just reach out to them, ask them a question. They'll give you as much information as they can. Ken Lynn, what happens if we can't pay our monthly franchise fee? I asked because that almost happened to me twice last winter.

It really like they're going to handle it like we would a customer and that is there's automations built around this. And then within a matter of a couple, like it's going to be. It's all about communicating. Like if someone is communicating with us, we will work with someone. But if they're not and all of a sudden they missed you, two months worth of fees, like all of you with your customers, we're going to let them go. So but if your customers contact you, like, hey, I'm in a really bad spot, I have cancer, I will pay these bills. Here's what I'm going to do to make sure it happens. Can you give me just an extra 10 days? We're probably going to work with you as you would probably work with your customers. And so if someone's communicating, that's the main thing. Someone hasn't had any coaching calls. They haven't talked to Lee. We don't know what's going on. They're not communicating the Facebook group, they're not asking questions on the mastermind. And then all of a sudden they start missing fees. As I would encourage with you, each of your customers eventually have to cut them off. Ken Lynn, follow Up question. Can we pay our franchise fees up front for the year? No, I know we can do that with copilot and get a bit of a discount. I'm not necessarily looking for a discount, just looking to protect myself in the case something happens this winter as last winter. No, no. We want everyone's cash flow to remain much more stable and not complicate things.

Mr. Anonymous, what is the permanent rate for opting out of max during business hours and what is the rate for opting in? Yeah, so if you're opted in, it is $1.09 per minute. If you're opted out, it's a dollar and 39 cents per minute. The reason we do that is because having him when someone's opted out, it just requires us to staff up more.

In excess of demand so that we can handle spikes. So it really helps us. It allows us to bring our cost down at command center. So we try to pass that along if someone is opted in.

All right, let's see here. Okay, make sure I don't delete any new ones. There we go. Very good, Very good.

Let's see. Next question is from.

Dustin. We have CCD invoicing. A ton of customers have card on file, but they were not charged. They were instead sent emails. Does it have to do a stripe or copa? Is. Is this a massive yellow slip? This is likely the.

Stripe thing. I would say send. Send the thing to the. The department, Dustin, because what they were doing is doing in batches of 10 customers were charged. Car file. They have not. They were not charged. They were instead sent emails. Oh, I see. You're saying.

It could be that they like the stripe thing. Just reach out to the department, ask them like literally just bring this up with them. Be like, hey, this is what happened. Was it a matter if we sent all the emails out or did we thought stripe charged and it didn't. In which case we are pushing out that the bulk charging thing. Stripe gave us a fix. We wanted to wait after yesterday to not mess anyone up. Probably the next couple hours we'll be live. So you could literally probably just click all of them and click charge. I don't know what stripe. Stripe does not like bulk payments, I have to say, but they. They permit it. The problem, the reason they don't like is they process all transactions at once. So if you do say a thousand transactions and you do both charge, it's literally trying to process all of them at the same time. And so what that means is if that goes up, if the time for per transaction Goes up too much that will timeout on your Internet server and on their servers. And so either a Dustin, they simply send out all the emails and as the L slip or two it is a matter of they thought they charged with the bulk charging thing and it didn't go through on stripes and so it ends up going out as an email.

Either way reach out to them. I would say though within a matter of a couple hours you could literally probably select all and charge their cards and you'd be okay. So I apologize for that. Regardless of which direction was randomly happened. Popped up with Stripe starting Monday, started slowing down when people started doing bulk charging and it got worse to where we saw hey, like anything above 10 starts to time out on most people's browsers. So I imagine though within two hours because they're testing it at I think 7:30 our time and making sure everything's live in production going well. Assuming that goes well, you're probably going to be good to go. So they're working with Stripe on it though to make sure that they bring down that processing time per transaction and hopefully they allow us to just segment the transactions. So.

Our bank also had some sort of credit card processing thing and they said they could likely be used instead of Stripe and save us money. Have you heard of this? Yeah, like all banks have trans. All banks have processing credit card processing.

Stripe is just universal for online. It has the best like PCI compliance. You have to worry about it. It's all taken care of. I highly recommend Stripe. Yes. There's gonna be ones that have 0.1, 0.2% less. We are going to eventually have a second processor that is a little bit cheaper. If you're doing over like 5, 600,000, it'll save you a little bit. But honestly, Stripe is just so solid. Like even with this thing, with this sort of thing, with this bulk charging thing, they immediately knew what the problem was. They immediately told us like, hey, here's what we're doing to fix it and if you guys can just wait for a few days, we can get this done for you. Like they're pretty good PCI compliance. You don't have to worry about extra fees. Like, you know, you'll see every, you know, every so often people complain about PCI compliance fees, annual fees, all that garbage. It's just nice with stripe. So they are kind of the gold standard of online payments, to be perfectly honest. So Dustin, reach out to the department. It's either gonna be a yellow slip because they literally just sent all emails out without charging cards, or they thought they charged the cards. They did in bulk and then it didn't actually go through. Like I said, probably within the next hour or two, though, we'll be able to just select all and mark them all as paid.

Yeah, reach out to them, though. Thank you, sir. Thank you all. Have a fantastic Thursday and we'll see you tomorrow.