Mike Minutes Mastermind 05/06/2024

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to another edition of the Mike Minutes Mastermind.

All right, couple quick announcements on Friday and Saturday did a bunch of updates to the done for you ads. So I sent everyone email on Saturday with all the updates that have been recent including the new Christmas lights page, the done few ads, etc, the new discount tire partnership. So definitely I think we crossed the 20 location marker for discount tire. So everyone should now get the updated 10% off on all your tires, your brake, etc. In terms of done for you ads, there's a new page completely revamped and then yesterday we were able to get shout out to the web team for working on the weekend to make it happen. You can now from the dashboard, when you go to edit your web page and then add something, you can just add all your tracking codes there instead of having to email them like it mentions in the done for you ads. So I'll save some time. Makes it really, really streamlined. So I made all of that on the done for you ads page. It actually has a screenshot where to go and walks you through the steps of what you need to do to put those codes in there so you don't have to email anyone to get those codes added to your website. All right. And all the other updates were included in the email on Saturday. So the Christmas light thing is huge. So as I mentioned before, there are five tracks I'm working on this this year. I'm really working mostly on a few of them and I'll do, I'll test them, refine them and then do the next ones next year. So there's five tracks there is for what you do during the off season. Number one is you keep mowing. There are a few locations that continue to mow per usual throughout the winter and their revenue doesn't really decrease much, maybe by 10, 20% max. The next option is to basically shut down and reduce costs as much as possible and really, really get skinny. So all general managers are in the field working. There is no overhead. Like you cut all overhead as much as possible, et cetera. The next one is winter services. And so there are locations that do winter services and actually make profit. Like my Mount Vernon location made profit in the winter. Fantastic. Why they went hardcore winter services. Getting scrappy doing that. So that'll be another track. The next track is snow services. And are there some locations that do a lot of snow and you can make really good money? Bellingham shop used to do snow. You make a lot of money. We just decided it wasn't it was too complex of a service. It was hard to train people up and it only snowed once or twice a year. But it's, it's a viable option. The fifth track is Christmas lights and I think it's a huge, huge thing for us. I really do believe that we can Augusta Lawn Care can make this our, our go to jam during the winter. And so I'm going all in on it. This is the one I'm going to be focused on the most this year. And for that reason we have created entire dashboard for you to buy the lights from Certified Lights. They have given us a huge amount of support in terms of webinars in person training, 20% off discounts on all their products and it's all branded from Augusta. So Augusta lightingsupply.com and it's password protected just for us and huge amounts of resources, training and buying the lights right from there. There's a big project I'm working on with the web team that is going to allow us to.

Make sure the brand of Augusta carries over into Christmas lights very well. And so that'll be coming down the pipe. We're working a ton on it right now. It'll take us a few months but I hope to have it done by July, all August and then also my hope is to be able to actually offer you all leads for Christmas lights. Something obviously we I'm full time media buyer. I want to be able to make it where we can offer a viable option not just to have the Christmas lights but while you're busy doing fall cleanups we can gain leads for you and be like a flat cost etc. So all of that I'm working on. I am very passionate about making sure that the the winter is not a time we all play defensive and retreat. We can actually go on the offensive and make really good money. So that's my, my big go to project I am working on right now.

All right.

Questions. All right, let's see here. Present we got five questions today.

Why is this not up here? There we go. Ok.

All right. Question number ones from Jeff from Sandwich Mike. My year over year lead flow is down approximately 50 for April. Close to 6%. Is this an overall trend you're seeing? If so, why do you feel this is happening? Very thankful for gust. As I navigate this challenge knowing all the tactics I've learned, I can deploy and tackle this head on. Yeah. So I remember Jeff when we were looking at all across the board you're on one of the worster ends of percentage of downtrend we're not seeing this across the entire board. We're actually seeing a few percentage points increase across Augusta. But yeah, there's some markets that like the markets that really inflated a ton during 2020-2023 in terms of massive amounts of people moving in houses, housing prices going through the roof, etc, those are the areas we're seeing the weakest spots in simply because now people's home values are coming down or it's tougher, etc in some of those, some of those markets, some markets just as hot as before. So like in Bellingham for example, things sell within three to four days. Still kind of insane, but.

It'S not really an overall trend in terms of why it's happening in some of these markets. In these pockets you have home values decreasing, you have lots of layoffs and it's just a, a return to the standard of what the market has always done. Instead of having massive amounts of people moving in, into town, et cetera. What I would really recommend is pivoting your marketing away from going after new customers and going after customers of existing vendors. So I think I shot a video on the second channel, come out next week or later this week. But it's really defining what we talked about a couple months back and that is like during the beginning of spring rush you're going to get mostly new customers. People have never had our service before. Later in the year or if you're not getting a lot of people moving into your city, you're wanting to go after customers that are of other vendors already, they're already using lawn care, their provider, they already have someone mowing their grass and you're going to go after their pain points around that provider. So it's an important way of marketing. And if you're going always after, like save time on the weekends, you know all these things about like save time, you know, don't have to worry about your mower getting started up in the spring. That's all fine and good to go after new customers. But 60, 60 to 80% of the market is usually people that are switching from another vendor. And so especially as you get later in the season, you'll want to pivot your marketing ads towards that. And I would also say, Jeff, like making sure that you're really exploiting your one click estimate, emails, your text blasts, going after that because that's going to be low hanging fruit that you had. You have more contacts today than you did a year ago and so I'd be going after that pretty hard.

Dustin from Bloomington Illinois. I need to convince Kyle and I to raise prices in Bloomington. We are currently sitting at 115 average budget hours for the week. If we move right, if we raise prices by 750 across the board, giving us a rough uptick in 16.8 budget hours weekly, we would basically be at capacity for two, mowing, two trucks, four guys, 138 budget hours weekly. We have adjusted prices back and forth in our calculator, but haven't done a blank increase like that. Like what I think we should do for two years. We are. No, not. We are not currently at capacity, but based on new estimates coming in organically, I think we would be in the next two to three weeks. Also, we have increased, increased from 89 budget hours to 115 budget hours since the start of the season. Spent under 200 in marketing in April. Our efficiency for our crews, for whatever reason, sucks. Low prices on new customers, training issues, running two guys in each truck, etc. Yeah, so raising prices will help with a lot of this stuff, right? Because efficiency will immediately increase because they'll be above budgeted hours. They'll get more budget hours for the same job and their P4P will increase, which usually is an incentive to move faster. Is 7.5 too much promote? No, I would do at least by $5, like at the very minimum. So 7.5 is fine. Would you raise each customer individually and adjust each on a different rate? Do you throw caution, the wind and just an email to everyone letting them know next week is the new price? In the perfect world you do. The first one is like everyone's prices are adjusted accordingly and correctly based upon budget hours versus actual hours. When I say that 90% of people never end up raising their price and for that reason I usually just say when you hit capacity, raise prices. And so in terms of convincing you. Here, one second. Let me connect my remarkable.

This is some doodles I made the other day. I'll share. Probably end up making a video about this.

Let me just connect my remarkable. Give me two seconds.

10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4. Oh, do I have to connect via wi fi to do this here? One second. I might. I might just have to show you. Here we go. I'm just gonna show you. Markle's taking forever. Oh, one second.

Present with screen share. No cloud connection. No, thank you. Don't want to do that. Okay, so this is what I'm going to convince you with. Did you ask me to convince you? Okay, so if you have.

Value and price and then all your Available customers that could do service with you, they're going to see a different value based upon their perception of your service. When you increase price, you essentially are raising prices to the fact where these people, you're gonna lose them, you're gonna lose these customers because now your price is going to exceed value. However, you're going to capture all of this excess value over here of people that stay. And if you do the math on this, if you actually just like looked at this, sorry, eventually there'll be a video about this, but you can actually see that it's a perfect doubling of profit margin and the amount of profit that you're getting. Because you can see here if you look 1, 2, 3, those bar graphs, I raised price, I lost all those customers. But by I gained all this extra profit of these three bars. And these three bars are exactly by area, double the amount of profit I'm getting from the three customers I lost. And so you double profit essentially. Like if you raise Your prices by 7.$5 per cut, can almost guarantee you will double your profit on your on the mowing. So if you're at capacity raising prices is you can do no harm like oh, I lost two or three customers that were actually good paying once I went back and looked at their account. Great, so next week you're going to get five more customers. Right. So Dawson Post Falls, if we follow the new dump free ads, is there any reason to keep hiring Evergrow marketing? It really comes down to if you want to spend time like managing your ads all the time and, and optimizing them. Right. If you're willing to take the time and if you have more time than you do money, I'd probably do it yourself. If you want someone to manage it for you and you have less time than you have money, probably a good idea to have someone like Evergrow be doing it. And so it really just comes down to do you want to be constantly managing it, tweaking it, adjusting it, et cetera. Google is a little bit less of a having to tweak stuff, but it's still a matter of like seeing, paying attention to what keywords are working, getting in there and adjusting it occasionally. And so it really just be a matter of do you have more time than you have money or not?

Dustin, update. We raised all prices. Okay, this is hilarious. Is that this morning? Yeah, it just happened. Let's go Dustin. We raised all prices of 190 customers. We raised about 60ish to make. The team can hit time during the spring and with two guys in the truck, the rest pretty much got a brink increase of 5 bucks per mo. Thus far, only two customers have pushed back a bit and no one has canceled.

I'm just telling you folks.

Oh it's so painful. The very first chapter of the book is like if you just do this one thing, it'll solve 90% of the other problems presented in this book. This raise your prices. It just boggles my brain. People don't realize just how sticky lawn care is because we're like oh, what about our competition? You think about your competition all day long. You think about your pricing all day long. Your customers don't want to think about getting more bids all day long and getting other vendors all day long to do a good job. And then when you raise prices, no one leaves. Like very, very small portion of people leave. That's why it's always like so hurtful when people throw in the towels. Like look, you're maxed out. Yes, I know it's stressful. Raise prices dramatically. And I tell the story at training of an owner that got Covid doubled doubled his prices and lost four out of about 30 or 40 customers. Doubled his prices. Like.

Yeah.

Joe Linenhurst from New York, he might currently having employee trouble. Oh, lost one guy a month ago and the guy who's been good has called out way too many times. Come to the point where I desperately need another hand. What's the best way to hire fast? We don't have much time and can hardly keep up with the work itself.

I would make time to do interviews as soon as possible. In the next few days I'd probably do like where you you tell cut.

Command center like on your wiki that you're not doing in person estimates you're only doing drive bys. Give yourself an extra hour to a day and stack every 15 minutes. An interview in the evening for an hour or two every evening. You should be able to get someone pretty quickly. Most locations are getting an overabundance amount of applicants like massive like throwing deed up ad that's free or five bucks a day and you're getting like 20, 30, 40 applicants. People are getting a lot of applications through the website. So I don't think getting the applicant is gonna be hard. It's gonna be finding the time to go interview them and then get them trained up. And so I would keep your current one guy that's working out decently, just not calling out too much. Keep him on so you don't overload yourself. But then in the evenings do Everything you possibly can to have an hour or two to do interviews and find the right person, even potentially find two people if you have to.

And to do to make carve out that time. If you're just overloaded in general, you might want to just do like no drive, but no in person estimates for like the next few days. That probably be my recommendation.

All right, we got some other questions it looks like.

I see copilot process each invoice engine now when processed in bulk. Love the message if the payment doesn't go through.

Oh, cool. Yes. Yeah. So last week the big focus was payments. And so now when we process payments, it's individually instead of bulk. That's what allowed us to get around Stripe's issue of.

The big delay because now each payment's being processed individually. So if you have like an Internet problem in the middle of a processing, it's not going to make problems. It'll just be individual and you can go see and stripe which ones went through and which one did not. So that was the timeout issue that they had created last week. So that was our way around it. And then if it doesn't go through, give you the message. So thank you, Vlad. I appreciate that. There's a big tranche of them, like 20, I think it was 22 last week of payment billing related stuff. One second.

Yeah, so 22 last week. And that was like the payment stuff like all around invoicing, dollars and cents being transacted. That's what they were. Their big focus was last week. You'll see big tranches come out every week or two now as they've kind of batched everything together. Vlad, why do we raise prices by a dollar amount and not increase our hourly rate to customers instead? Mostly just for the sake of simplicity, Vlad. Yes, you could raise your price to someone be like, hey, it's going to cost you 47.63. Absolutely could do that.

It's just, just the same though, to do budget hours at 0.46 and charge them, you know, a more even rate. So either way, I have not seen.

People argue both directions. I've never seen a correlation between having a to the penny for mowing. I've seen a lot more for projects where it's a larger ticket amount. But my thing I've seen in terms of pricing strategy that works far has much more statistical advantage is like doing 39 instead of $40. I've seen that really work, but I've not seen $39 and 14 cents outperform $39.

Enough for me to actually care. So.

I can see raising a dollar amount if you want to give your crew more money.

Okay, one second. Why do we raise prices by a dollar amount and not increase our hourly rate to customers? Instead of.

It does the same thing in terms of raising prices.

You're effectively doing the same thing, Vlad. It's. It's okay. I see you're saying. So you can either give yourself more budget hours or you can increase your hourly rate to raise prices. Like, if your objective is I want to raise prices. Okay, do you want to raise your hourly rate or do you want to give more budgeted hours on the job? Either one does the exact same thing, and either one affects P4P the same because ultimately your labor revenue is the same. So it really doesn't matter. What I'd be asking in case of do you raise budget hours or do you raise hourly rate is, are your guys currently approximately hitting budget hours? Because I want that number to be accurate. So if they're already crushing budget hours and you want to raise your prices, I would say raise your hourly rate. And then that way your. Your budget hours don't keep going up, because I want that. That budget hours to be approximately accurate. So actually, great question. Really good question. If you're raising rates, typically what we talk about is like, just add more budget hours. The exact same process of raising prices could just be saying, raise your hourly rate, budget hours stay the same. So it really. It's just a matter of which one do you want to move? And I would say keep your budget hours accurate. Great question. Really solid question. Vlad. Good job.

Cool. All right, everyone, I hope you have a fantastic, great rest of your Monday, and we'll see you all tomorrow.