Mike Minutes Mastermind 05/05/2025

Hello everyone. Hope you're doing amazing back in the office. You might have got, you might get the text here in the next several minutes, so probably halfway through and I need to drop it in the Facebook group.

Yesterday. If you did not get it, please check your email. I sent out a email notification, announcements, kind of a summary of the past few weeks of things that have been updated. As of today, you are able to add credit card on file to your website. Instant pricing forms for mowing. So yeah, go check it out. There is a few step process to set up your stripe account because we don't have access to everyone's stripe account and so there's a few things we do need you to change. So.

That is all inside of the email, shows you how to get there. Also tonight on the office hours with Nick Reed, he's going to be going through this in depth. So I would recommend being on there. He'll walk you through. It'll take you two to five minutes tops to get it set up correctly. But you do need that in order if you, if you want to accept credit cards from your instant pricing, you do not have to do that if you're afraid it's going to hurt your close ratio. You want to see how it plays out, that's totally fine. I've had it at my locations and we have not seen a material impact of decreasing the number of leads coming in. Um, and again like if you require cards on file, it means that you're sending out emails and text messages getting the card information anyways. And if you're gonna actually require like they can't get service without the card file, then you absolutely want to have the credit card form. So this is my $0.02. If you were to maximize every single lead possible, you want every single person, you're probably going in person, estimates, et cetera. You don't want cards on file from your website. If you are requiring cards, credit cards right now, you want to have this on your website because it reduces the additional email required to get that information from the customer. So it's very helpful for that. And you no longer have to check like did they put the card on file? Did they get the automation. Oh no they didn't. I got to take them off service. So anyways, all that's in the email. There's several other updates in there in regards to Mike AI and as well as some of the new forms or the banners we have on the website. So go check that out. Good announcement from last night. There's four or five other updates in there. I think that was very good.

All right, zoom in here and get rolling.

Share screen. Yeah. If you haven't been one, I highly recommend this evening, every single Monday, Nick Reed does the office hours. He answers questions. It's a zoom call, so it's more in person. You can go back and forth in dialogue. So highly recommend. If you haven't been to one, hop on there. I know my general managers are always on there. Nick is always on there, happy to help however he can. And I know this evening he's going over the paid in full feature that dropped last week from copilot, the use cases for that as well as setting up your stripe for your instant pricing forms. If you want to add your credit cards being collected. So it's very seamless. They put, the person, accepts the estimate. It goes right to a credit card form. They fill that out. It literally shows up inside Copilot. That card is inside of their customer portal. It's very smooth. So, yeah. All right, let's jump in. First question from Jameson. Hey, Mike, another question for you here for, here for you. It is me and one other guy. After Today, we have 65 budget hours of just mowing with projects. On top of that, we are in growth Mode, pushing to 300 to 500k. We have done $30,000 in work total the last two months and we have been in defense trying to hire someone but can't seem to get anyone to stick. We also have customers from last year still at $45 per hour rate for mowing. Should I raise prices in all the super slow, super low price customers to give us some breathing room while we look to hire someone new or keep our head down, just chug along until we find get someone because we are still in growth mode. Thank you. Yeah. So like this is burning a hole in your pocket unless you have significant amounts of cash that you're willing to burn through. If you hire someone right now, by the time you pay, just even base pay in taxes, you're looking at 25 bucks an hour. That's already 55, 60% of revenue going out the door. And that's, that's, that's if they were working at 100% efficiency, they're not. So you're probably spending next to 70% of revenue direct labor. You'll never make money. You will lose money. Significant amounts of money, like 30%, you're probably losing on these. So I would if I was you. And I was, didn't you know? I was not like, I must grow at all cost Especially right now because you don't have the employees. If I was you, I would do a price increase. I would raise this to a minimum of 65, 70 an hour. It's gonna be a big jump, there's gonna be some people leave, but then it's a function of like. This is also a short term band aid fix for this current capacity issue because in a matter of just a few weeks, you will fill those customers back up in the spring rush and you'll be right back to where you are right now, which is you can't find an employee. So give yourself the breathing room. But then also like it is still hot priority to find an employee. So yeah, in short term, like from a breathing room perspective, I would raise your prices. Especially if you know that, hey, these are the 20, 30 customers, I gotta raise them. I would raise them all. You know, they need to be rip the band aid off, probably lose 10, 15 of them. Give yourself a little bit of breathing. We're talking only like six or seven budget hours a week though, so it's not like you're giving yourself a massive amounts of breathing room here. But it'll give you a little bit of a reprieve to give some time hopefully to interviewing. That's really the objective. David from St. Matthews. Could the web team make a link to book coaching calls from the coaching website where we fill out our scorecards? I always book my coaching call right after I fill out max metrics for the month and it feels like an unnecessary step to have navigate to the franchise dashboard, a completely different website. It would be very helpful to be able to book coaching calls directly from the coaching website. Okay, well, I know that Joel and Nick watch these and they are always collaborating on what the next move is there. So they will take this into consideration. I am, I am sure.

Mr. Anonymous, keeping this a little more private since it is about an employee. All right, totally fine. They will be taking over the location with us doing 60 to 100k per month. Okay. He's been with me for five years and has been with me when we were doing around 20 to 40,000 per month, which calls for 25% distributable cash. However, when I hand off, it'll be in the 15% negotiable range. What do you think is most fair considering he has played a role in helping me build this point. He wants a higher salary, so I assume start at 15 and give him opportunity to earn more percentage points as time goes on and he as he takes more and more autonomy of the location, what would be tasks that he could take on to earn more percentage. His goal is so that I don't even have to come in anymore and start more locations to do other things. Okay, this is a really good question. So for example, the distributable cash percentages that I share in our documents, now that my general managers have been with me for quite some time, I have gone above those percentages as a form of retention as well as like, they do a great job. And so like I have increased. Like once you have a good general manager, you give them incentives. And I want that incentive as much as possible based on my performance. And then I want their salary just keep them comfortable. So it might be 60, $70,000 or whatever that base pay is, but then I want lots of upside for them. And so on a location that has up to $100,000 per month in revenue, I'm going to assume it around 800,000 in annual revenue and in profit mode heavily, I would give them a good chunk of it now. So what I would probably do is do a 15, 25 and 25%. What they can achieve, I would start them at 15% because they're asking for the higher base. Okay, great. We'll give you another five or ten thousand dollars in annual base pay. That's going to start you at 15%. At 20%. Here's what needs to be done in order to unlock 20%. Here's what needs to be done at 25%. Now this is what I would do in order to be able to tie this to performance of location and longevity. This is what I would do. I say, hey, you start at 15%. Here's your higher base pay. Awesome. Let's go. When the location has been profitable for a consecutive X amount of months, you get to 20%. When the location has been profitable with distributions for X amount of quarters in a row, you unlock 25%. So just reinforce like profitability is super important. Secondly, as they, as they become more consistently profitable, so Q4 will become the big thing for your general manager in their mind because they don't want to break the streak. And I would tie that 251 potentially to an entire year where all four quarters you get distributions. If they do that, I'm happy to give them more. It's when there's any negative quarter of cash, of distributable cash. I am very tight with giving out profit sharing and distributable cash. Very once that has been ticked off. Now the location, in my opinion is deep. Into profit mode. So we talk about profit mode all the time. It's essentially raising your prices instead of getting more trucks and equipment. I would say the profit mode 2.0 version is.

Is you are like you are raising prices and you, you are making significant amount, you're above 20% profit margin. And furthermore the, the biggest detriment that can happen when a location has been doing that for four plus quarters. Like I would say you're deep into profit mode when you have four straight quarters of distributable cash. There is no quarter where you don't make a distribution. That's what I would say. You're deep into profit mode because you can be deep, you can go into profit mode and raise prices but still have, have like Q4 collapse. Great. But like the best version of profit mode is I do not have a quarter where I do not take money out of the business, including Q4 collapse and Q1. When cash flow is low, I'm still taking money from the business. That's when the location in my opinion is a matured state of profit mode. That's where that's why I say usually like even once we enter profit mode, I still say the third year after going into profit mode is when I'm shooting that 7,800,000 in revenue, annual revenue, because I know that's usually when I can solve Q4 collapse for good, have distributions every single quarter. And from my, my location's perspective, that takes a few years. So all that to say I would probably tie that in with the 15 to 20% and the 25%. And then if they're asking for the higher base, just be like, hey, higher base, totally fine, we'll charge at 15%. But here's how you could earn all the way up to 25. So I'm not, I am not opposed to that.

Key from Calgary. Would you charge in person estimate fee during spring rush? Just break the days. Just breaks the days. Oh, breaks the day. So what I would do first, if it's, if, if your trouble is breaking up the day, I would put your estimate availability in the evening. So like three to five, for example. So that way it doesn't break up your day. Yes, it reduces your availability, but it doesn't break up your day. So if that's, if the pain point is breaking up your day, then I would do it in the end of the day only because your current constraint is not leads. And so if you lose a person or two because they can't meet in the evening, who cares? Because the Reason I say that is because you will have maybe a 10 to 20% drop off by saying hey, I'm only available in the afternoon. Evening you will have probably an 80 to 95% drop off of leads if you ask for a fee before meeting the customer. So it just depends like what level of, you know, of. Like I've seen several locations do that. They, they add, add an additional fee just to do the visit and we're talking 80 plus percent drop off. So if it's just breaking up the day, I would probably just do evenings to fix that problem. If it is an actual problem, like you do not want customers, charge the fee. Or better yet, just put a banner on your website says we're not taking customers right now for one time projects. You can do that. There's several banners we have for spring rush based upon like what you want to say that you can choose from the website if you want like one of them. Like we're just focusing on recurring and existing customers. One time projects are currently booked out six months. Like there's a couple banners in there if you could put that in there if you want. Because honestly sometimes it's more headache to like get the fee and then like, then they feel entitled. Like there's, it's not, it's not as easy. Just like hey, pay us 50 bucks and then we'll do the estimate. Then they feel very much entitled to stuff and then if they don't accept, it gets a little hairy sometimes. So Thomas from Clinton. How the heck do I even begin with finding my own? Connor Hutchinson, lol. So like in general what you're asking is how do we find a starter gm? And what you're really looking for is someone who is an entrepreneur. They usually do not have the funds to get started, but they have, they have the, usually the raw talent, they have the ability to sell. So I'm looking for someone that I had done outbound sales. That's what I'm looking for. So in, in the new training for new owners, we now have a segment on this part of finding GMs and when it says sales GM, if you're trying to get someone that wants to start locations, I'm looking for an outbound salesperson, someone that has knocked on doors, someone has done outbound calls. I'm not looking for someone done inbound sales. Inbound is customers come to you and they set up appointments on your calendar. That's inbound sales. Different skill set. Not to say that those are bad. You still have to close and get over objections, et cetera. You still have to collect money. But outbound sales is a different breed of person because they are actively calling out and they're, they're actually interrupting people instead of people booking time on their calendar. And so it's a different breed of people. So for example, like we're just starting at the franchise level to do outbound. So Lee seen like there's different types of people that book Outbound vs. Inbound. Inbound is very much like people have seen the content, et cetera. Then there is, and this is what we're seeing right now with GMs applying at locations. If you can get someone who's watched the content, they understand Augusta Nation, they want to do a 3F program. Those are very high quality. They're inbound leads. Outbound leads is you go and advertise on indeed you have to go out and you know, pitch becoming a general manager for you and like interview, interview process much more rigorous, etc. So outbounds is a different game. Dakota back there that does Augusta leads, he's outbound all day long, 100 plus calls a day. He's cold calling people like very different than inbound. And so I'm usually looking, if I'm looking for a sales gm, I am looking for someone who's doing outbound. Now the question, Thomas, becomes your size of business doing 30,000amonth in revenue. You're kind of in that in between spot. Like you need an operational GM to make sure things go smoothly once you get your full time job back. And then.

But you also kind of want a salesperson because they've got to get above 40, 50,000amonth in revenue. Like they got to get there so you can turn the profit knob on. And so you're kind of in between. I don't know how much of your involvement you could serve as the salesperson and then let me an operational gm that's gonna be an easier position to find. So I, if I was you, Thomas, I would go back and watch the training. Cause it'll make way more sense to you. Now I know it's been short. Like I think it's this spring. You basically ramped up to 30,000 month in revenue. Very good. Now it's challenging because I gotta find a GM so I can go get my job back, which was planned. And you scale it. You did a great job. Now it's a function of which is easier to find sales GM like a Connor or can I go get a operational gm and then you cover the gaps of the salesperson, the entrepreneurial side that's knocking on doors, generating the sales, because you do need a little bit more sales juice to get into profit mode. And so that would be what I would be trying to do. Depends on your schedule, what you're able to do with your. Your job. But that would be, I would try and do is like, taking on sales myself in evenings and weekends and then having. Finding an operational GM to be able to run the cruise while I'm busy. So that would be. That would be my plan of attack.

All right, everyone, hope you have a fantastic Monday, a great week ahead, and we'll see you tomorrow. Take care.