Mike Minutes Mastermind 05/03/2023

Everyone, let's get started. Let me go ahead and.

Get YouTube set up here, add a few announcements, a couple things to go over, and then if we have time, we'll get to the questions. But I wanted to go over several things. Let me just change this. Mike, Andy, Mike. Minutes.

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All right, number one.

On peoplesoftware.com.

You can now just quickly mark people's late from their time card. Let me show you exactly I'm talking about. This video is available on pvp software.com I put it on the chat or on the Facebook group last week, but I understand everyone's very, very busy, but I wanted to go over this quick because there's questions about it still yesterday in the Facebook group, we are a time card. You can now simply just mark a time card as being late.

Right here and that'll make a, a note on their user account. So that way, for profit sharing, at the end of the quarter, it's easy to look back and see who was late, etc. Right. So that's all you literally need to do is mark them as late or, and, or you go to their profile and you can add it in here at the bottom, show mark dates and it would show any that were marked and then any notes that you added and you can have late, no show or call out. All right, so a call out is if someone calls out within the time frame that you've allotted for profit sharing. You could do a call out and give details. And if they just don't show up, same thing. And if they do, if they're late, you can add that in as well. That way on their user account, they keep track of all of those for profit sharing. All right, so there's a video on this, going over this that I posted in a chat last night on the Facebook group and I posted last week as well as on the Facebook group for P4P software members. And if you would like to join that, you're more than welcome to. I try to make sure that if there's any really important features in PvP that's changing, I let you guys know in the Augusta franchise one as well in terms of updates to PvP. All right.

Testimonials for those couple locations that have done that. I really appreciate it. I'll kind of keep harping on for the next week or two. But like, there's an email, everyone has, there's two links. One is for your employees, one is for your customers. Send out both of those. The more the better, if ever we're Going to get a couple of both. We'd have hundreds of employees talking about working Augusta and we would have hundreds of customers talking about gusta in video format that we can utilize. And it looked very cool. I don't know if I've ever shown you guys what it's actually going to look like. Give me a second. This is what we're trying to build.

Instituted already. We were testing with the ones that we got last week. Right here. Let me share this. Share. Where's my share? Share, share.

This is what we're trying to build for employees as well as for.

Customers. It automatically scrolls. If I go here, it stops. I can play it immediately. This is what we want from hundreds of customers, hundreds of employees based upon whether we're trying to hire someone or trying to get new customers. This all scales to the website. It looks beautiful and we can absolutely make this look really, really good for hiring as well as getting more customers. So please, please, please, if you have an employee that potentially could work for this, please ask them to make a video. I put on the Facebook group yesterday an example of a customer one as well as an employee one that has already been submitted. So feel free to watch those. Feel free to send the exam those to your employees if they need an example of 1, 15, 20 seconds of your employees saying like the one I got yesterday is like they made. They're making the most money they ever have because of P4P.

That's awesome. Get some of those. And we put that on your careers page or you drive people there from. Indeed. Let's go. Same thing with customers. The best ad in the world will be for us to be able to drive traffic to a page with hundreds of people talking about how great the service was. So please, please, please get those done.

I'm gonna go over. I think it was Kyle Turner's comment in the Facebook group that was pretty lengthy.

Just in general about like capacity based growth. So we'll go over that in a second. I did want to say though, in landscape business course, everyone here has access to it. If you don't know how to get to it, go to the deals page on the franchise at the very bottom. It gives you the code to get in for free. I put in a couple consulting calls in there. If you ever think you're too. You're spending too much on marketing, listen to the one I posted Yesterday. Guys spending $20,000 a month, $15,000 a month on Google and $5,000 a month on Angie's List and is going to probably do like 900,000 in annual revenue this year. Just overspending to the max. And it's important is the reason it's a good listen I feel is you'll hear me talk about how taking that away, that and decreasing revenue but increasing profits will absolutely serve him and how he's just bought into this notion of like grow, grow, grow, grow and and literally has a 350 plus customer acquisition cost.

Closes about 15 to 20% of his jobs. So there's a lot of big issues but big numbers. So if you like, if you want to have a good listen, check that one out. I put it on landscape business course and MBA for entrepreneurs at the very bottom. You can listen to that if you don't have access to that. Again, the code for all of Augusta Nation, it's totally free. Do not pay for it. It's free. Just go to the deal section in on the dashboard.

All right, let's jump into this one from.

I did not read this whole comment but as soon as I saw I thought I'd just be a good one for risk to go over. Okay, so Kyle Turner wrote in on the Facebook group.

Feel like I'm in a dilemma at the moment with the way our business is progressing. So I think just for everyone's context, Kyle has two locations. He had to let go of his gm. So let's continue. As of right now, we have more work than we can handle. The guys are averaging 10 hours of overtime every week, which is equally about 120 hours of overtime. We're paying out a month. We had to let a guy go a month ago and that put us behind. And I found two candidates, but they can't start till the 15th. We're still gaining clients pretty much daily at this point, trying to figure out if we should cut off all advertisement and trying to turn down any potential customers, at least until we get these two new hires and see how they do. The other issue is we're growing way faster than we can financially afford to buy new trucks, small equipment, mowers, etc without going more and more in debt, which we've already done some this year. Should we turn down every. Should we turn everything off and just focus on what we've got and try to profit the rest of the year because at this point we can can't even afford the growth model which we desperately need. So the command center can take a lot off of our workload. It's honestly hard to admit that we're getting into a jam and I feel like I have a major FOMO turning off all the new leads we to grow. We really do. And we are fast. But at what expense? As are we ourself and our business at risk by doing so. I value your guys opinion. What would you do? Do so. Okay. Wrong. Kyle, I apologize. Totally messed that up. This is, this is a solo operator. I apologize. I always get the two of you mixed up. I just. I'm sorry. Kyle's solo operator. This is a good problem to have, okay? The fact that you have that much overtime and this much work coming, ultimately it's a step back and realize if you would have asked yourself a year ago if you would have this much work coming in and you'd be thinking about turning off leads, it'd probably be a problem you'd sign up for. So step back and have that recognition and awareness first, okay? And be thankful for it because it's a better problem than. I've talked with a couple people in the past week where this is not happening for them and they do not have enough leads coming in. So good problem to have, number one. Secondly.

You are when you start hitting above your capacity and that's what's happening from a employee perspective. That's why you're having overtime. And when you have 120 hours of overtime, you know that you can, you can get another employee and immediately that gets fixed. So hiring is going to be the solution in terms of the pain of, of not getting work done. Couple things you can do in the short term and then the long term. Short term, from now to the 15th, I would recommend moving all your projects off and only focusing on your recurring M.O. so it's like, hey, any projects that come in or any projects are in from now to like the 20th, I'm going to reschedule them. If you lose one or two of them, who cares? I do this last year at a location where we were just completely overbooked. Way too much work. And like, hey, call every single project. Marcus did this for me, bless his heart.

And call, call every single project and reschedule them for four to six weeks from now. And if they cancel, doesn't matter.

That gives you some breathing room over the next few weeks. Okay? If you really don't want to turn off leads, that's fine.

But only accept. I would personally only accept over the phone estimates for mowing, giving you the chance to train these guys up, allowing you to get these projects moved off so you have some breathing room and get a couple guys in ready to go. I would not have all the eggs in the basket of two guys starting the 15th, I would be hiring right now because there's a very good chance that one of those people don't show up. And the other guy, it's a 50, 50 chance if he lasts three or four weeks. Like, let's just be honest. So don't put all your eggs in that basket because what you're going to do is you're gonna make this even worse by putting all these projects off three to four weeks in the hopes that these guys are going to work out. And if they don't, you're in a really, really, really bad spot. So don't compound the issue. Hire, keep hiring. And you're going to be able to keep hiring because you're going to move these projects off. And if they cancel, it doesn't matter. You've got a ton of leads coming in that would fill their spot anyways. And you should absolutely be raising your prices immediately. I would like right now, raise all the prices of all your mowing customers immediately across the board. Don't question, don't overanalyze. Raise every single person by a certain amount. Tell them that their new price going forward will be this amount you look forward to bringing your property. Simple. All right?

And yes, you're getting to that point where you're having that pain point of like, man, you, you need command center and you're still SOL operator. I understand that. So focus on making it profitable at this stage. Focus on making it profitable by increasing your prices. And then give yourself some short term pressure alleviation by moving those projects off. All right?

But do not depend on those two guys showing up and like solving all your problems because you're just walking into a bigger problem if you push all these jobs off and they don't work out. So keep hiring.

I just. If your guys are not making a P4P right now and you're struggling with the guys showing up and all the rest of it, do what we just. We are doing in Bellingham tomorrow. We are raising our P4P percentage for two months out of the year. Further. April and May, we're going to move it to 45%. It's just because in this market, I can't afford to have only half of my guys hitting above base pay during the time we need them the most, which is spring rush. I need them crushing it just like they do in summer. And you're like, oh, what about the cost? Like, can you afford to be able to do that? If they're hitting base pay, they're Costing me more than the 33 or 40% that I'm giving them anyways. So give them the 45. You've got to make sure P4P does absolutely nothing. If they're not incentivized, nothing. If they're hitting base pay, P4P is meaningless. So if your guys are hitting base pay, you either A, need to raise prices so they can get to it, B, become more efficient with your routing so they can also be hit above base pay, or 3, you need to increase the percentage you give them because you're not increasing the percentage or you're not giving them any more money until they're above base pay. The only guys I'm giving a quote unquote raise to and get paying out more money to is the guys who are already above base pay, and they're basically going up higher. What I'm trying to get is the guys that are making 16, $17 an hour and get them up to 20. So now they're like, oh, P4P is real. And it changes the whole dynamic of their work ethic, right? So.

I'd be doing all those things. By the way, when you raise prices, Kyle, you're going to essentially be giving your team a bonus on P4P. So now they're gonna. They're gonna essentially be getting more money. So if they've been struggling to hit P4P because of all this overtime and all the rest of it, now they're gonna all of a sudden be above base pay. So raising your prices and increasing the percentage is something you must be doing. If you. If you guys are not hitting above base pay and which way you go, they're raising prices or.

Raising the percentage is mostly gonna come down to your backlog. If you're six weeks booked out and you're overworking your guys like you are, that's when you raise prices. And. And by doing that, you give them basically a bonus on P4P. If you are not. If you do not have a five, six week backlog and don't have tons of leads pouring in and your guys are not hitting above base pay, you might need to increase your percentage. It's probably the right thing to do. You are not paying them any more. If they're hitting base pay by giving them a percentage increase on P4P. So we're going to start doing this at Bellingham because during April and May, it's extremely rainy here. We row every single rain day. Grass grows like crazy. We bag clippings. It's annoying as all get Out. I can't afford for our guys, only half of them, to be making less than above base pay. The morale just sinks, and people call out people, all this other stuff. So I would personally, in your situation, Kyle, raise your prices. Push off all jobs. Next three weeks. Move them all off. And if they cancel, you do not care. You apologize, you give them all a call. This is happening. It's not an option. I can put you on this date. We're just understaffed. We're really, really sorry. But if you give me this time, I'll make sure I get there. On this date. They cancel. Who cares? Push those off. Keep hiring. Because now you have. You should have a little extra time on your hands. When you get these guys on the 15th, you have some time to train them. Don't put all your projects starting the 15th. Put them only the 20th or the 25th, so you can get these guys up and running. But keep hiring. Try to. I'd still be trying to find someone tomorrow and the next day. I'd keep trying that.

But give yourself some breathing room in the meantime by moving off your projects.

Right.

All right, we got some questions.

Kevin from Bloomingdale. How would you handle a yellow slip for. The employee doesn't need to go back to the property, I. E. They don't lose any P4Pmoney. Example, they accidentally scraped the grass with the mower. So the grass turns brown for a week or two, but will eventually grow back. And there's nothing the employee can do if I send them back to the property. Example two, they perform poorly in the lawn, and the client cancels all feature visits. Would we take money off their P4P bonus? If so, how much? Yeah. So if someone's crushing P4P and they're doing stuff like this, that's when we really, really hurt them. Especially if you're losing a customer. Because loss of a customer. Like, what's the value of that? Well, if you. Your customer acquisition cost is. You would technically make that a yellow slip, right? So we've done that in Bellingham, especially during the summer when guys are just crushing P4P, making 28, 29 an hour. Like, okay, guys, if there's any flaw and someone cancels, we're going to take out customer acquisition costs off of your paycheck, and all of a sudden, it helps. So, yeah, same thing with someone's. We only really do this if someone's. Repeat offender. Like, if someone just does accident, like accidentally scrape the grass, we're not making a big deal of it. Even if we lost the customer, honestly probably wouldn't. However, we will make a big deal of it as this happens over and over and over again. We will charge them for not only the customer acronym cost. We'll turn for the time that command center spent talking to a raging customer for 20 minutes. And then we, the general manager had to get involved and email them and send pictures and all this. We would charge them for all of that time and we multiply it. But the rate that we're charging for labor. So if you're charging 80 an hour and it's been an hour's worth of your time and half an hour's worth of command center's time, and you're getting charged on that, I'm charging the. That them on. On yellow slip. You can only really do that, though, if the person has is really crushing P4P. But making a lot of yellow slopes, that's the corrective action you're going to take. Again, that's why you want your guys above base pay, because they're not. There's no corrective action in this case. And that's why you'll see yellow slopes goes through the roof. When guys are above or below base pay is because there's no. There's no consequence. That's why you need them above base pay. I can't overemphasize this enough. If your guys are not hitting above base page, something must change. All right.

Kevin from Bloomingdale. I've started putting the total budget hours for a given route in the name of the route so the employees can see roughly how much they'll make. I was thinking I could just write in the route name how much they'll make on P4P that day total. As a kind of a driver, instead of them only knowing how much they make at the end of the day, this way they know the night before or the morning of how much they potentially can make that day. I love it. This is exactly what we're trying to do with P4P Software's integration with Copilot is that when they log in, they clock in in the morning, they can go to the P4P app and see how much money is they're making that day. And then as they finish jobs, see the dollar amount go up. So this is exactly what we're thinking. Obviously, Kevin, at your size, you can. It's okay to do this for a few employees. It just gets very cumbersome because you're doing all their routing and scheduling. Then you're trying to figure out their PvP. Then you're putting the dollar amount. Then what's going to happen is you're gonna start moving things around on the next day and then they're gonna want to know what that number is. You have to say, hey, wait for the P4P card to be submitted to you. So I like what you're doing though. This is 100% what I want. That is for the guys that show up in the morning say, oh, I got, I can make $300 a day if I get all these jobs done. That's what I wanted them to be able to see. And I want them to see, live throughout the day as they're going through the day, how much they're earning. So we're probably still three to five months away on that though. Four to six months. Kevin from Bloomingdale for new hires with no experience, how many budget hours for weeks one and two, would you suggest putting on the schedule for them as they are training? For me personally, if someone's training, I don't even look at them as completing budget hours. That's why I want to get them through training as fast as possible because they probably contribute maybe 15 or 20 hours, but they probably slow down their trainer by that amount almost. So until someone's through training, which might be only a few days if they're experienced, but likely I'm looking at like a week or two. I'm not really planning on them executing on budget hours for that first couple weeks. And that's why I was telling Kyle there, don't expect on the 15th for you to put your projects, I'd be. I'd be looking at the 25th or beyond because that's when you're actually gonna have guys that are capable of completing budget hours accurately and efficiently and you're not doing training. That's a very conservative approach. When you're. When you're in the spring rush and you're way behind, you might look at them and say maybe a 15 or 20 budget hour person because like you're just going to throw them mult jobs or weeding jobs or things that like super basic because you just are way behind. That's fine. But a more conservative approach is going to be until someone's trained up, you don't really account for their budgeted hours because the training the trainer lost loses efficiency. Connor Hutchinson Huntersville, North Carolina do you ever see a time when Augusta starts doing brand awareness marketing or is localized doing the long term strategy? I really don't think so. I think the only Time that this would ever happen. And we might test this out in a year or two if we keep growing in around Charlotte is potentially, you get locations together that do like a marketing co op. And that'd be between franchisees. You're like, hey, there's 10 of us. Let's go ahead and run some XYZ ads. Or let's go ahead and put up a pay a thousand bucks a month and do a billboard when everyone's driving into town. That'd be fine. But between franchisees, I really have no interest in collecting people's marketing dollars. I've seen how it works in other franchises and Anytime Fitness and it is Most the time 3 to 4x the customer acquisition cost compared to localized marketing, like, it's insane. Like, the marketing budget for Anytime finished last year was around 11 million.

With all the money they collect for all the franchisees, the marketing fund was $11 million. And I think about 4 or 5 million of that was deployed actually to marketing spend because the other half of it gets spent in like managing them and all the rest of it managing ads and having offices and all the other overhead. And I still have yet to get a lead from them still. And I pay $600 a month for.

Brand awareness and yet I can drive in 20 to 30 leads a week using the marketing that we do locally. And we spend less than $2,000 a month. So.

Landon Smith, Tallahassee, wanting to test out the market in my area, like you talked about yesterday, this was my thought process to test instant quotes. Door knocking. Every door, direct mail, Facebook ads, Google. If you're listening to this, he puts numbers for each of those, what he's going to spend and how many he's going to do. How are you going to go about testing each also for the every door direct mail. Should we be sending them three times to each address or to a wider net? Once trying to go about this plan like you trying to go about this like you plan to every direct mail. I'll probably do it two or three times again. Remember, I'm doing it in a month. I gotta be faster than in the perfect world. You do exactly what you just said here over the course of a month or two and then you would track it. And ideally not just one month because you really need two or three months to see how the Google is doing. And the Facebook, especially the Google, based upon your seasonality. I'm gonna have to do this in about three to four days and I'm gonna start knocking on doors. I'm gonna start doing instant quotes, and I see what's working and I see what's coming through my Facebook ads, I see if I get anything coming through my Google and I'm immediately going to pivot. So within the first week, I have to figure out what's working in my market. And then I'll go. You'll just see what happens. Like, I'll just put all my eggs in that basket and just keep pounding it. I have a feeling it's going to be instant quotes and door knocking simply because I'm going to be past spring rush in June. So, like, I'm going to have to pound some payment because my demand is just going to be lower than it would be if I would have started, like last month. But we'll see. I don't know. And I'm just gonna have to test it out in the first few days. Like, if I start doing door knocking and instant quote door hangers and I get a couple customers in the first day, you better believe you're gonna see me doing it every single day.

And I'll figure out, either hire someone to do it for me more often or I'll do it. I'll keep doing it myself.

But this is the right strategy. That is test things, figure out what's working, cut very quickly, and whether that quickly to you is three or four months or three or four days, make it quick, and then go double down the things that are working. If you do instant quotes and you're like, man, it worked great for Chuck. He got like three customers in an hour. Great. You do it for two days straight and nothing's happening. You haven't got a single call. Guess what? It's time to abandon that strategy. Okay, you might want to go on a coaching call and ask why it's not working and see if there's things that you're doing in terms of pricing or how you're approaching it, or if you're knocking on someone's door and you have sunglasses on, not a good idea. Take your sunglasses off. That might be helpful, but ideally, just pivot quickly.

So again, like this, this is why I want to do this thing in June. I'll be doing exactly very similar to what you just said here, but I have to figure out within a week or two. So I can actually execute the last couple weeks of the month and get it ramped up. But I like your strategy. Landon Smith, Tallahassee. I have a client who has been on weekly service for the past two months and said they were on bi weekly. They are A good client, I want to keep them. But they requested their money back for bi weekly cuts, I assume just give them the money back. But one to know, how would you go about clients like this? First? I personally, if you are, you have some time, I just go stop by their property and like, hey, we can buy weekly. Were you guys home? Because like they could have told you guys, especially after the first invoice, whether you're invoicing weekly or monthly, like they've already got an invoice for, for weekly. So like it's very strange.

But by you addressing it in person they might literally be like, yeah, like we didn't get see the invoice in the first one. We're sorry, we haven't been home.

So if they're a good client, obviously we're going to work with them. I think it's a matter of talking to them. I think most people are reasonable, especially if you come and meet them in person.

It's the advantage you have over command center. We cannot go knock on people and talk to them in person. So like they have all sorts of courage that comes out when they're talking to someone they never have seen before. So talk to them in person, like, hey, this is what happened. We sent an invoice. Did you really get that? Obviously you can see if they got it or not.

And just see what they say. I think you could probably resolve this honestly. And they say, hey, let's just move forward. And you know, they might have, hey, I want an email before you come to services. Hey, look, going forward we can go ahead and remind you prior to coming the email the day before if you want, say this never happens again. You're reasonable that way. Typically people are pretty good, honestly and if they're not, then you let them go. But it sounds like they're a good customer. Like at the very worst, yeah, I would probably just let them. I probably refund the difference between their weekly and bi weekly prices, which is not going to be as much as you think because 1.5 times you're not going to replace like every other visit. You're going to be placed like one out of four in terms of cost because bi weekly is going to cost more. So you could just have that math for them too. Like, hey, here's what it costs. If I were to charge you bi weekly, here's what you got charged for weekly. I can, I can refund you the difference. I wanted to explain kind of why it happened. So you don't think that we were trying to Cheat you or anything like that. If you come from that perspective and explain it to them that they got the invoices and all the rest of it, they might be like, hey, you know what? You're right. Like as long as going forward, you let me know you're coming. Send me an email the day before you make an automation for that. That'd be great.

Will P4P still notify us of the most efficient employee for the previous month?

The 3D notifications should be set up. Yes, as long as your 3D notifications are set up, you should be getting that. We are working this week on having multiple manual adjustments, multiple breaks, as well as.

The ability for the employee to be LC in previous time cards from month prior. We had a problem with one of our franchisees employees that was could not see previous month's history. Didn't believe them, actually emailed me directly asking for their time cards. I didn't. I, I basically just said, you're gonna have to wait until this feature's done, bro. So anyways.

Hey Mike, when is the deadline for the employee recognition videos? Are we able to have two employees in the video at once? There is no deadline. I want this to be an ongoing thing that you always have those links and they're always being added to. It's a constant live feed that people. It'll constantly add the videos and we can edit them, take ones out, modify them however. But there's no deadline and you can absolutely have two employees in there. Ideally, if they're both good talkers, you'd have both of them do separate videos just for the sake of volume. Right now I need as many as possible. We can't launch that, that page with two or three. We need like at least 15 or 20. So please, please, please, as we all work on that would be great. Which link do we need to copy and paste into our one click estimates? I noticed yesterday there seems to be a different thank you page. After submitting contact information, there are a couple different thank you pages. It depends on what you want to say. Off the top of my head I could try it, but I'm going to mess it up. So I'm not going to give you exactly what those link names are, but there's a couple different pages based on what you want to say. One of them is we'll get you back within like two days and that's the one that's standard. I'd recommend within 48 hours or we'll get back to you as we possibly as soon as we possibly can. And there's another one that says something like we'll get to an estimate to your inbox. And so that way you could use it. If you were wanting to do like mowing and just wanted to do over the phone estimates, Command center can pump those out for you. You could use that one. I would personally just recommend using the standard one that just says within a couple days we'll get back to you kind of thing. It sets the expectation and then if you fall behind or you're running behind and you don't get to for a day or two, you're okay. But then if it's Command center is able to handle it get out right away, then great. I usually just set the expectation for a couple days.

By the way, if you want Command center, they could probably give you the two different options or links that we have for the thank you page. But I just use a standard one that says a couple days. I'd recommend that one. I like the monthly efficient notification. Makes handling handing out the $100 bonus easier. Jeremy from Augusta, Georgia. Yep. And, and too, like, if you have the app yourself as an employee, you can literally just go onto the monthly leaderboard and see the top spot too. But that the, the monthly efficiency notification, that 3D notification should be coming to you as the manager again, little bell icon at the top of your desktop and it'll give you things like who's the top person for the month, etc. So give me like a month or two and I'm definitely open to other 3D ideas that you guys might have around P4P.

So. All right, everyone, have a fantastic day. Look at that. 30 minutes on the nail. Let's go. We'll see ya.