Mike Minutes Mastermind 05/05/2023

Hey, everyone. Opening. Super. Happy Friday. Let's get started. I'm setting this up. Make sure you remember to get testimonials from your employees and from your customers. I only have a couple of each. Well, I think I actually take that back. I think I have eight employees now. Seven or eight employees. And I have two or three customers. We need a lot more before we create this on the website. So please, please, please. And the weekend and going next Monday. If you can text that link again, check your email I sent to everyone last weekend. Check your email. Two links. One will go to your customers that you want and know will leave a good testimonial, and then the other will go to your employees that you potentially also have. You know, they will leave a good testimonial for working at Augusta. I can refresh this. This should work. Come on.

Am I not live on Facebook? Oh, my word. I'm on the wrong one. Snap. All right, give me a second, guys.

Sick on the wrong stream. Oh, brother. Give me a second.

All right, let's see here. Why.

Sick toy messes up.

Leading this now. Delete, delete, delete, delete. Sorry, I put this on the wrong Facebook group. I put this on public Facebook group. Of course I put it on the same. Delete this post.

Okay. All right. No longer are we doing that. Okay, very good. Now I need to make sure it's on the correct one. Sorry, guys. This is embarrassing. Share. Okay, now I'm on Facebook. Okay, we're live.

Only one person got in. That's not an agrastination, so shame on them. Leave. Okay, we have trouble. Yes, of course it is. Good. Now I should be able to post this.

Should I get for these logos being too close for these two Facebook pages? All right. Boom.

Actually, I'll refresh this.

There it is. Let's go. All right. Sorry about that. Pain the butt. Let's go and get started. So again, reminder, just joined testimonials from employees and from customers. Please, please, please get at least two or three each.

There is a link they sent last week for both of those. I don't care who those customers are. If it's your friends, family members, etc, Please, please, please make sure that you.

Get those. We need at least 20 right now. I have, like two or three customers and I have seven or eight employees. So please look at your email from last week. Get the links, send them out on the weekend or not Monday at your meetings and things like that and get those. That would be fantastic. We really, really need those. I think it'd be super helpful for hiring and super helpful for customer acquisition. So I want to, I need to make that page and then we'll test some stuff off with advertising against that page and seeing how that what your acquisition cost looks like when you run them to a testimonial page instead of your website. I have good feelings about it. All right, let's go ahead and jump into questions.

I think Ryan Payne was having an open house today. Yeah, look at that. You can see his thing on Facebook, on the group. All right, mastermind questions. Here we go. Kyle Darvin what type of qualities would you be looking for in someone that would be GM quality? They have to be self motivated, be able to discipline themselves in terms of their time, their schedule and time management. They have to be able to ideally lead individuals. And that's tough because some usually you're hiring someone that doesn't have leadership experience and management experience.

But usually you can see those qualities. Even if they're working out in the field. Do they lead the team? Are they just a naturally that everyone gravitates towards someone that can be pretty decisive in terms of they're okay with saying hard things to the team like you will work tomorrow, it's Saturday, you're coming in and sticking to it. That's not easy. A team member and someone that is a friend of everyone in the team that can sometimes be a learning curve for them. There's certain times that you as a manager have to pull people in. You have to tell them what's new. You will finish the next three jobs, et cetera and then walk that fine line of that versus you need the you need your team to stay and you can't mistreat them or make them feel bad or push them too hard because then they'll leave. So those are qualities you're looking for like some sort of team leadership. Ability to be able to rally the troops. That's important. And then lastly sells. They gotta be able to sell whether that be in person, whether that be over the phone. They got. They can't be afraid of follow up calls. Those are the type of things I'm looking for in gm.

Kyle Tarvin let's say I don't end up finding anyone worthy of being a GM this year out of my current employee pool. If the business was doing well financially, would you look outside the business for someone I am currently looking working on undoing a lot of the bad habits and bad employees at our more location but eventually I do want to hand this location off again or possibly hire a GM to start up a new location for me while I work on pumping out profit with this one. I just don't want to get stuck at the two locations because I can't find GM quality people to hire. It's not, not a bad thing if you do go out and try to find a GM from day one, because what you might potentially get is someone who's currently working as a field lead or a project manager at another larger company, and they want more autonomy, they want to feel more in control of their income. So it's not a bad idea to go out there and be like, hey, we're offering, you know, 50,000 salary or 25 an hour, whatever you want to do for a GM. And you try to get a good, good GM, someone that doesn't have any experience that I wouldn't be giving them that kind of money for as a GM if they have no experience in, like you're pulling them out of the field. But if you, if someone has comes to you and they have five years of owner of managing a business, five years of being a project manager or a head, you know, tech, and like a team lead at another company, and they're a massive company, and now they're like, hey, I want to work for a smaller company, have more autonomy. I'd pay them 25, 30 bucks an hour.

So keep in mind too, with the working GM model, they're out in the field working, and they should be able to cover their cost of their wages with their work that's getting done. So, like, when we started four new locations, we only had a couple that we could pull from our current employee pool. And so a few of those did have to come from.

The outside, outside the company. Just because we only had one location area. Now we needed four more, and I'm starting a fifth one. So we're not gonna be able to pull, like, I'm probably not gonna be able to pull my, my GM from the current pool. I'll probably have to just hire from day one someone that's going to be a gm.

Devin Sheridan Red Deer, Alberta. Hey, Mike. And he's. What's your smoking policy? I have an employee that smokes after work and he might be a good GM one day, but smokes. Should I get him to quit or fire him? Yeah, like, for us, as long as when you're on the clock and we're on the customers and property and in our trucks, you're not going to be smoking. That's how we do it. It's not how everyone should do it. We understand that we are limiting our employee pool by 70% when we do that.

But we say, hey, like if you want to do it at home, if you want to do it after work, that's totally fine, go for it. The likelihood of them being able to do it just at home and not at work is typically pretty low.

But like, yeah, just, just, I would, I would recommend at least just don't do it on the customer in front of the customer, like on their property. Like at the very least make it. Sure. It's like, hey guys, you guys can smoke if you want, but you've got to do it on break or you gotta do like in the truck. But it just comes down to can you put that filter on employees and still get enough applicants? Right. In some markets if you put, if you put a no smoking policy like completely on, you might lose 80% of your, your applicants and therefore not be able to find anybody. Right? So it's like what are you willing to tolerate? Keep in mind if you switch that policy, you're going to lose a lot of people, right? So if you say oh, we're going to no smoking, you're going to lose everybody. If you're in no smoking and you switch to smoking, you might lose people that literally are staying with your company because they can't handle smoking in a truck with somebody else or they don't like that smell when they're in the trucks because, because it's always in there. Right? So just, you know.

What are you willing to, able to. What are you able and willing to get away with is like in terms of still finding team members. Kyle Tarvin. I talked with Chuck and the game plan is to raise our base pay to 15 an hour and increase P4P to 45 for the next two months. Should we bump, should the P4P bump be for landscape ammoing or just mowing? We just do it for mowing. We have the guys that switch off mowing and landscaping every few days. Yeah, we just do it for mowing. Inside the P4P software we just make an additional rate for any time they're on a mowing route. We do not change their percentage on their employee profile because that would then affect projects. So I think that was self explanatory enough. Yeah, we basically don't change on the user profile because it will change them for projects as well. We only do it for mowing and we do it using the additional rate column on the P4P software.

Kyle Tarvin, do you have any tips on being able to find and more importantly, recognize people that can execute tasks well. For example, you have Lee, Liz, Chuck and other people that go out and execute your vision every day without your direct supervision. 24, 7. A few things. One, all of those individuals started at the very bottom, right? So I guess Chuck would be the only one that started off as a gm, but he started off as a GM working on the field, right? So, but all of those individuals, it's a, it's a long term trust that gets built up. Like, I don't ever ask any of these individuals what they're doing and their, their schedule or if they're busy or they're not busy or like anything like that. I expect them to regulate themselves in terms of not overworking themselves, but I also expect them to regulate themselves. Like if they're not, there's not a lot on their plate that they're going to help someone else out. And so that comes with a lot of time, right? So all these individuals have worked for me at least a couple of years.

And it's just track record, right? The same way that I say that though, the same thing needs to be said for you as an employer. Your employees are watching you for your track record. And so if you say things and then you don't execute on them, if you say you're going to be opening up more locations and creating GM opportunities and then you don't, if you say that you're going, they're going to make more money on P4P and they don't. If you start doing that, you're setting them up for PO point time and time again to things that you said you would do and did not and therefore the trust is broken there.

You know, for all the ideas that I have in my head, I rarely say very many of them because if I can't execute on them, I don't want my team to hear it. And that's different for everyone. I'm not saying everyone should do that. I'm just explaining my, my thoughts. I don't say stuff if I don't think we can do it. And it's not about like, oh, you should have bigger goals. Like, trust me, I have some pretty big goals. But I'm not going to talk about it unless I can execute on it because otherwise I, I look to my team as a someone that just has a random ideas and then 10 or 20% of the time I'll execute on them and get them done. And so I'm not saying that's right or Wrong. I'm just saying that's how I've done it. So that I build up trust and.

Then I can trust them and they can trust me. Right. I can trust that they're executing on the roles they're responsible for. And they know that I'm going to execute on the roles that I have, which is mostly around strategy and then executing on things and developing systems for them to be able to continue to grow inside the organization. Um, so how do I find them? You don't. You get. You get. You get people in the bottom of the Org. You start to. You just two things. Try to get good at identifying, like we talked about earlier in this. In the Mastermind, identifying the individuals that have traits that can succeed and then secondarily build your company in a way that allows them to stay with you and grow inside the company. Because the alternative is they'll just go somewhere else, right? Because if they're really, really good, they'll just, you know, leave someplace else. And then you've got to convince them that your vehicle is going faster than everyone else, regardless of whether or not the other vehicle is larger or offers more money. In the short term, it's like, look, yes, we're a bike right now we're going seven miles an hour. However, the rate at which we're increasing is like, we're going to be a Ferrari. And so why would you get off onto another bike that's going 10 miles an hour, I. E. Making a little more runny, a few more perks, whatever, when, like, we're going to become a Ferrari and go 200 miles an hour, Right? So you've got to convince them. And I think the best way to do that is for them to be able to trust that you execute on what you say you're going to do. So if I say, hey, right now we're only in six, seven miles an hour on our bike, don't jump over on this other bike that's going 10 miles an hour and has stayed at 10 miles for the past five years and can offer you a little more money or benefits or whatever. Because here's my plan, and here's what I might. Here's my plan to execute towards getting toward the Ferrari. And here's my. Here's the past history of going from 1 to 2 to 3, to 4, to 5, 6, 7 miles an hour on this bike. And based upon that track record, I can promise you I will get to the Ferrari. And by being on this and staying on this bike with me for now, you will end up making more money and being on a bigger company and a company that does better and is more fulfilling and challenges you more often and grows with you and challenges you in terms of your skill set more often. That's the only promise you can give. And that's why in my opinion.

The location model of doing GMs and then growing those up and then getting a regional manager and then you can keep copy pasting allows a very, very clear picture for your team to move up into. Like, hey, I can start in the field, I can maybe become estimator, do more projects, things like that, grow with the company, make more PvP, I can become a general manager, I become a regional manager, etc. And so.

That'S what I'm constantly trying to look how do I build that inside the company? And so sometimes I'll run things that do not make sense financially simply to make sure that we accelerate the speed at which we are growing simply so that I can retain the people that are staying on the bus.

All right, next question. Augusta from Lyndhurst. Hey Mike. Trying to change the percentage of labor revenue distributed to employees from 33% to 40% for this month. For some reason, all the time cards I would not recommend doing this.

For some reason, all the time cards from this Week still say 33 labor revenue even after generating payrolls. I tried. Yeah, because it's in your. It's in their employee profile. So the part at the bottom of the time cards is not telling you anything other than what is on the employee profiles. It's just a reminder. We do that for the sake of running payroll. It's way easier. So if you're doing an additional rate, that's fine. I wouldn't recommend going back in time, by the way, but let's just say you're trying to do that.

The amount at the bottom there is only literally just reflecting from the user account. This week still says 33%. I tried creating new ones for today to test it. It only applies for new time cars, but still says 33 despite an organizational saying, saying 40%. Not sure if I'm doing something wrong here. So organizational settings is over. Over.

What's it called?

It is superseded by the user settings. Right. So your organizational settings might be at 40%, but if your user settings are still at 33%, that's what's going to be shown at the bottom of. Alright, so if you want to, you can change it in there. But keep in mind, if you do that, you're doing that for all your projects as well. Okay. So I would personally recommend not going back in time and doing this because it gets messy and you're not gonna like pay someone for 3 weeks ago what they what they did and like, oh, I'm gonna do more now. I wouldn't recommend doing that. I just recommend for going forward on I would not recommend if you're doing it just for mowing, I would not do it inside of the user settings. I would do it as an additional rate. That being said, if you're going to change in the organizational settings, it will not change the user settings. And the user settings is what is being reflected at the bottom of the time cards in text. And so that's why you're still seeing the 33% even though when you run the payrolls it's actually it is running the math based upon whatever new additional rate you're putting in there.

Devin Sheridan how do employees see these routes and job costs on P4P or other softwares? How do employees see these routing and job costs on P4P or other softwares? They don't see any of the job costs right now unless you're sharing it with them on the job notes, which I recommend doing when we integrate with P4P down the road, I'd like to integrate also with QuickBooks to be able to share the P L and share more overhead and profit sharing and open book management inside P4P app. But for now it's not. It's not really there. So like I guess to answer your question, if you're wanting to show expenses and costs and cost of a project, you need to be putting in the estimate notes.

And for Marietta location. All right, let's see here. Following up concerning what was determined when you and Liz discussed notifications given to us for new entries put into our essay databases. Whether is an entry of someone out of our service area that we now have the conduct in for info for and how to categorize them. And for instance is when simple OTP we sent out by CC and for instances when simple over the phone estimates are sent out by cc, we would like to follow up with the customer before receiving an automated email from SA five days later to follow up. Okay, when CC schedules drive by estimates folks who call in we get notified because dispatch to us. What can be done to have some sort of similar notification for entries for those other two categories? Other two categories? Sorry, I'm just not understanding. Give me a second here. What can be done to have some sort of similar notification or entry for the other two categories, I'm guessing you're talking about OTP being sent out. You want to be notified that the OTP was sent out. Let's keep reading. We noticed one entry that was marked as out of our service and entered in but it's actually Jason's service area. We emailed CC yesterday to change and change the entry into Smarter's database. It was a few days out before it was noticed on our end before asking for that shift as you know that passing time we just getting a customer or not before they go follow through with another company simply want to execute on any leads we get with the quickness without wasted time things a ton. Yeah. So in your database it'll say.

Out of service area. They would jump into a different, like a different account and then complete that estimate and everything for the customer outside of your database. Right. We're not going to tell you like hey, we're not going to give you all the details of their estimate and like what happened after we hey, they're out of their service area. We're jumping into someone else's account and then we're going to complete that in inside of there. This other part I'm trying to understand.

You're doing over the phone estimate and you want to be notified. It sounds like.

Okay, it sounds like you want to be notified when OTP is being sent out or when.

Someone is entered in but they're out of your service area. You could set up an automation yourself on this. We don't have this set up because in my opinion if someone's doing over the phone estimate, I want them to sell the job and if they get on the phone, I just want to have a job pop up saying like hey, this is ready to schedule. And the second option to that is they don't sell a job on the phone and I'm going to get notified like you said, five days later to follow up. So what you could do is move that follow up sooner if that's. You could do it the next day for example or create another thing inside of your automation that is like the day after. So that way if someone does otp, they don't get sold, you want to call them the next day. You could absolutely do that and set up an automation. If you don't want to set up an automation, I just recommend.

Having your estimates check them each morning, see which ones went out and just calling them, calling any outstand, any estimates. This is what I'm going to do when I'm gone. Any estimate that Is not accepted or lost. Accepted or yeah, one or lost. There you go. If it's not won or lost, I will call them every single day. I'll just go through my estimate page and just call them every single day until they either want. Until they decline it or they accept it. That's what I would personally do. But you can absolutely send out a note or create an automation that instead of five days you could do like the day after could absolutely do that. Or two you could do.

I'm trying to think about the other one.

You could create an automation whenever a customer is. Is. Is enter like created it sends you an email. So that way anytime server, command center like set up a customer for you and like started doing estimate you could be notified. There's. That's the only trigger though. If they find out then they're out of their service area and then they jump ship and they go into someone else's account. So you could do that. I wouldn't recommend it. You're going to get cluttered because you're going to get a bunch of those and then you're going to get also the invoices being their estimates being accepted. So I personally would probably in this case.

Not worry about the out of the service area ones.

You're just going to get their information saying it's out of the service area. They're going to jump into someone else's account and finish everything in there. The second part I would probably either a create automation for day one or day two. If you want to do a follow up or, or second option just go your estimates page and see everything that was sent out and if it wasn't in person and you want to follow up with them, just go for it.

Personally I will call every single person that's not won or lost until they get. Until they are either accept or decline the estimate. I'll just do it every single morning. So I don't need an automation for me to do that. I'll just open up the tab and just go through the list every single morning. I highly recommend doing that. So like I could have an automation to tell me that. But like I just know exactly the workflow and I was like open up the estimates page. Filter by open, call every single one.

All right, where are we at? Let's see here.

Okay, so yeah, so if you want to be notified when any entries are put in your database then I would create an automation that anytime a new customer is created you get an email. You could absolutely do that.

Got it.

Is command center Essay is being slow. My goodness. I want set out a one click and have no estimates on dispatch. Is my one click just not of interest to people. You can see in your email history if people have been clicking on on the button.

I hope you've tested your email before you send it out. I'm hoping.

But you can also see if people are clicking on the estimate or clicking on the one click estimate email. But in notifications it's telling you just go to your notifications. It'll tell you if people are clicking on it. And if they're not.

You would go to email history, make sure it's being delivered correctly and then if they are clicking on it, then Command center will be doing them.

We were caught up end of last week and then this servers output like what's. What's most worst? What's worse about Command center is when you have to create an estimate three times just for it to stick. Like you create it. You put all the information in there, click save and it just doesn't stick. It just like does to nothing and you do it two or three times. That's been the worst.

So yeah, I had one on ones and that was the constant theme of the report is people frustration with essay and creating estimates.

Send it to about one hundred and twelve hundred people yesterday morning. Yeah. So check your notifications. You should be getting notified if people are clicking on it and if it's for mowing and you have OTP set up at Command center, then they'll be coming through. And I don't know exactly what time we're at right now. Liz can fill us in if needs be. But they will get to it. Absolutely.

Yeah. We were caught up last week like down to the minute, like on estimates being sent out. And then we got hit again with this estimate creation.

Stuff. All right guys, have fantastic weekend.

Spring rush is hot and heavy now for I think everybody. So it's better than not having any work at all. That's the, that's the only positive thing. And.

If what's. What's so brutal about Spring rush is when you feel like you're completely overwhelmed and something that you're not thinking of happens negatively, like the employee you could always count on leaves. Or all of a sudden a tax bill from like three years ago shows up and you're like, what in the world? That's the part that makes it most demoralizing, makes it very difficult because in addition to that you're also physically worn out. Your team is worn out, worn out. You're trying to balance the financial side because you are collecting 15 to 30 days behind and you're trying to hire people, buy more trucks and equipment, trying to grow. So this is tough. This is not an easy time of the year. So keep your head up and have a great weekend, and we'll see you guys on Monday. Take care.