Mike Minutes Mastermind 05/02/22

Good morning, Augusta Nation. I had several questions come in, so we'll bounce through those tomorrow morning. I'm gonna have some updates, actually, so I'll wait till then because I have, like, I think I saw, like, five questions came in on the weekend. So I'll answer the questions today, but tomorrow morning I will have some updates. It'll actually be going over a bit of a road map on some of the focuses kind of on a monthly basis going forward for the rest of 2022 and into 2023. So stay tuned for that one tomorrow morning. I'll go over that one. All right, let's go ahead and jump into questions. Cool. All right, make this a little bigger for you. There you go. Cool. This one comes from Jason Knoxville. Do you have a recommended revenue goal before you offer paid vacations? So paid time off is something that we added a couple years ago. We did it honestly as somewhat of a way to get around our state's paid leave program. The paid leave program was where they essentially get a week of paid leave for being sick. The problem with that program was the fact that someone could call out two minutes before their start time and say, hey, I'm sick. I want my paid leave.

And so the state basically said, hey, look, if you beat this program, like you offer more than a week, then you can do away with this whole sick leave thing. So we opted to do two weeks, so basically double the benefit to the employees. But by doing that, we have somewhat more control over when they use that paid leave, and we basically use it like it accrues, and if they want to cash it out, they can. And we don't really have strict guidelines if you have to be sick or anything like that, but it does allow us to prevent someone from calling out day of, and then they just, you know, just ask for their paid leave. So that's kind of why we originally did it, honestly. But in terms of offering as a benefit, if you're not kind of trying to get around something in your state, I would say, you know, once you become decently profitable, it's something that is a good thing, especially for employees that stick around a long time. It's kind of like unemployment. Like, unemployment doesn't really affect you. If someone gets fired or, you know, if you let them go or they leave or whatever in the first three months, it really doesn't matter. So if someone leaves or you fire them and then they apply for unemployment, don't worry if you've hired them less than three, three months, it rarely, if ever will Affect your rate because they look at the last full quarter when it comes to determining your premiums on unemployment. A similar thing would go, in my opinion, for paid time off. It doesn't accrue like it accrues at a rate per hour. We do not just like give someone two weeks the first day of work, like you got two weeks of paid time off. It'd be ridiculously stupid to do that, especially in this labor market when there's a higher churn. So I would say you're really. What, what's nice about paid time off. I feel it's a good benefit for people that stick around because they actually accrue. They can actually use it when there is an actual emergency or they have a family issue or sickness or whatever it might be. So I feel like it's a good benefit for people that stick around versus the people that stay two weeks. Like they literally might have accrued a whole hour of paid time off so they don't ever use it. So that's what I like about it. And it just, again, trying to keep people is extremely important. I made a video on the weekend, it'll come out later this week, about how important to keep employees is in the cost of attrition. And I kind of made the assumption that every month, if you look at the average tenure of all your employees, like how long they've on average been with you, I would go to argue that for every month of added tenor, you're adding 1% of net profit to your bottom line. So if you have an average business that has 10% profit margin in this industry, if you can keep employees for, let's say that your average tenor is three months, which means you have someone from two days ago, two weeks ago, six months, 12 months and 18 months, and you average all that comes to say, let's say three months average tenor. My argument is that you go from a 10 profitability business to 13 profitability by having that three month average tenor. And I also would argue that if you can keep that, that group of people for say six months average tenor, which we're talking about averages, which means if you hire someone tomorrow, you're gonna bring your average way down. But if you can bring that average tenant to say, six months, I, I believe you'd go from 13 to 16 profitability. There's so many efficiencies gained by just keeping employees. And that's what the hardest part about for all of us right now is just keeping employees. And so when it comes to paid time off, that's a big reason why we did it. Same thing with medical benefits. It's rewarding the people that stay on longer instead of offering more dollars per hour, which is just really going to be incentivizing the people that are getting started. And your lowest performers on P4P will make that dollar amount. So that's what I like about paid time off and medical benefits is it's going to reward the people that stay on longer, and that's really what you want to be rewarding. So I wouldn't say there's a specific dollar amount I have in mind, Jason, though it'd be more a matter of when can I afford it. Because I realized that keeping people does affect profitability. Not to the same extent that you're like, we pay a lot for medical benefits and paid time off. It doesn't come back to the bottom line necessarily. But there's also other benefits outside just profitability that are affected by keeping employees on longer, including morale and culture. On essay, is it possible to automatically send payment receipts to only one client? In general, I don't send payment receipts, but one client is asking for on a consistent basis and I'm looking for a way to automate the process. So obviously there's a way to do this where Clearant will send an automatic receipt to every single client. You could go into their clearance account and do it. But from an automatic standpoint, I don't believe this is possible because there's just one option right now to automatically do it, and that is just across the board. Every single time you charge a card, you can opt in to have a receipt sent to them. And we don't usually do that because we already are sending a paid invoice receipt via email and that's kind of our receipt to the client. So we don't do that. But if there's one specific customer asking for that.

I don't know, you could contact clearance, but I. I don't think there'd be an automated way to do that. So I would say, though, definitely just make sure you have a. You're saying the paid invoice receipt, but the actual receipt of the transaction that would be coming from clearance and something that I don't think there's an automated way to do that. Just one person isolated right now.

Right.

How do you recommend tracking employee upsells and leads? For example, for instance, if an employee gathers someone's contact information, how should I keep track of this and checking to see if the leads sign up in the future? Currently, I'm using A spreadsheet and searching essay for matches periodically. Yeah, like doing a more manual process isn't such a bad idea for this because they're not. It's not like you're getting swamped. You're not like getting 10 or 15 of these a day. You'd be lucky if you got one a day, even when your crews are larger. And so doing a more manual process isn't a bad idea. Honestly, it's just tough because if someone gets like a business card from one of your guys, they're gonna call and they're gonna say hopefully the person's name. That's the only way we can keep track of it. And we put on there, you know, talk to Austin in the field and got and said they're interested in mowing, whatever. Now again, though, what you're talking about is the most accurate and that is get your crew to submit the information to you. And ideally they either put that in job notes or they're texting you whatever. And then you're going to keep track of, you know, that employee and that customer. Again, we're talking about, like, if this happened once a day, you should be thrilled out of your mind. I don't even think it'll happen once a day. If it happens three times a week, you should be thrilled out of your mind. We're lucky to get one of these, two of these a week, even with a larger location like Bellingham locally. So I don't mind a more manual process. I don't. You could obviously use tags and service autopilot, but again, it just. It's still a very manual process. You got to still add the tag. You might as well just look at and manually check and see which. Which employee brought that in. And we're pretty liberal with it. Like if a customer accepts anything and we, that employee got the customer's information, they will get the $50. We're pretty liberal with it because we want them to be thinking about it and be top of mind.

So yeah, I'd say at least once or twice a week we handle hand those out locally.

And it's almost always the same couple people. Dylan from Baton Rouge, what do you think about putting a QR code decal on our website, on our. To our website, on our trucks? Just saw someone in my market doing it and seems like a good idea to me. Yeah. So we put QR codes on the most recently updated flyers and postcards on the pro shop, on trucks. I just want everyone to ask themselves, when was the last time you walked up to a truck and scanned a QR code. That's really good customer behavior. Things sound good when it comes to marketing all the time. Same thing with SEO. And then you just gotta ask yourself, when was the last time I actually did that? Right. Like, is there anyone in the comments that can say in the last two weeks you've walked up to a vehicle and scanned their QR code? Like you have to be pretty close too. You can't be like 30, 40ft away and scan a QR code. So you're literally have to walk up to the truck. It's not like you'll be able to drive by. Maybe if you put in the back of your truck they could scan it from like behind. Like if they're 15, 20ft behind in a vehicle, but that's like the minimum amount of distance if they're not going to get out of their vehicle, which most QR codes will not scan if you're 30, 40ft away. So again, it's great in theory. I don't see it working very much. I've never scanned a QR code off of a vehicle ever. What people are going to do is they're going to see a logo and that's why we make that massive. And they're going to literally go either Siri or they're just going to type into Google Augusta lawn care. And that's when we want to pop up. And that's our main focus. So it looks great though. Makes great in theory. Makes sense. Theory. Nick P4P fixed request under user settings for employees, can we have the ability to exclude them from the monthly dashboard results if they have been moved to inactive? Reason I ask. I had a guy leave at the end of March. Mutual separation. But the last week in March he was on a job. They had a callback was completed in April. Yeah. And still came in under budget hours. So this employee got $28 in PPP and zero base pay. So he's first place for the whole month. I'm sure there are reasons to keep them including the rankings for competitive reasons. So maybe if it was only an option to exclude them when set to inactive, then we could decide on a case by case basis to keep them show up or not. Yeah, no. So this would definitely be done. It should be basically where if they're inactive they're not going to be shown on the rankings. We can absolutely do this as a matter right now we're really trying to focus on this trends. I think that's the most important thing for the employees to see over time, especially their first couple months of working, to be able to see their improvement in their pay, even if they're under base pay. Right. So let's say your base pay is 18 per hour. And you're like, it's very hard to motivate someone when they're making 11, 12, 13 per hour because they're not making above base pay. My goal with this trends thing is that they see them making 11, then 12, then 13, then 16, then 17 instead of quitting. Because, like, this P for P for P thing is a joke. They see them trending up and they'll stay on. And that usually happens around month two. Unfortunately, in this industry, so many of our employees don't even get to month two, and therefore they never think P4P works. And so I'm really, really focused on this trend thing right now. But there's definitely something we can do down the road. Nick. It just be a matter of, like, if someone's inactive, they don't show up on those dashboards. But this is obviously a very specific case and this shouldn't usually happen. But yeah, if you have a call back the next month on a project and they crush budget hours, yeah, I can see this happening. So that'd be demoralizing for all your crew that stays on. They're like so and so left. They're making more money than us. So, yeah, this could definitely happen. We can make it where in an active employee. We wouldn't even make it an option. It should just be done that way. But for now, right now, we're just really focusing on this trends thing and to be up for you and your employees to see over time, the metrics. Instead of just a snapshot, Whoops. Just a snapshot in history. So it's all the questions I had on there. Let's see here.

Upsells and leads. We put it in the office notes, in the customer profile. When we go to schedule a job, we always reference office notes and then see if an employee was the referral in the office notes. You got it. That's exactly right. Are there tutorials on the P4P website? Yes. P4psoftware.com training. There's training there specifically.

Cool. And if you guys have questions, there's that chat specifically on P4P software for all of you. And we have access directly in your back end of your accounts, which is really cool. So that way Brad can diagnose issues and things. So if you go to p4psoftware.com, you sign in and then in the bottom right, you'll see an intercom. You can chat there. And Brad can help if you have specific questions, just chat in there and usually the next day or two, he'll respond back to you. But yeah, the actual tutorials are on there. PvPSoftware.com training so cool. That's all the questions I had today. I'm going to cut it off there. But tomorrow morning I am going to be showing kind of a month to month plan and schedule of events and kind of what I'm focused on over the next 12 months. And so make sure to stick around for that. I'll do that at the beginning of the of the call tomorrow morning. So that way if you need to bounce off the call later on, you can absolutely do that. So thank you all so much. Welcome to Monday, another great week. Let's kill it. Take care.