Mike Minutes Mastermind 05/07/2024

Hello gusnation. Hope you're doing amazing. I'm in a new part of the office. Better lighting. Let's go. Let's get started. Jump right into questions.

Oh I didn't put this on the Facebook group. 1second. Copy paste into Facebook.

3M0507.

All right, got seven questions this morning here on May 7th.

Jump right in.

All right, first one is from Eric from Largo, Florida.

I have a customer that accepted an instant quote on the website on February 24th. Property was serviced on.

April 1st, 13th and 27th. Tried getting a card on file a few times along the way with calls, emails and texts but kept getting voicemail and trying to collect since the end of March. Had CC reach out multiple times also and when we did get through she was in the middle of class and said she called back. She finally responded to my last overdue Invoice SMS on April 30 with I never hired a guest of lawn care. I've sent numerous messages after that after service reminder emails. Multiple services provided multiple calls, emails, texts and lots of voicemails left. Of course I shouldn't have service without a card and file and I'm usually strict on it but made a bad call and service anyways as I am growth mode and not and trying not to delay initial modes. I have had another customer speak that after you got a door hanger I hung it, went online and accepted a quote on the website as requested as a weeding upsell. We are almost done with the first mowing service. He came out and said he never hired us. Also no CC on file. Another drop ball on my end. Are you seeing cases like this with instant quotes just boggle their mind? People can't accept and they claim they didn't for sure. It's a minority of cases and I'm guessing the answer is it takes to take the good or the bad scenario because nothing is perfect and humans do silly things. But I, I I'll feel better after you say it.

Yeah, so this is going to happen even if you have if you sent people estimates. This happens one off cases where people just don't want to pay you and they'll try to do this sort of weird shenanigans. The bottom line is you have to be very deliberate about clicking accept. We've made it specifically where they can see the price. They click accept like it is very deliberate. And some people ask why you make it so deliberate because I know I'm adding friction to that process instead of just allowing them to immediately accept the quote they have to accept the terms and conditions.

So if you this was like a big big concern of yours, you could add it something to your fine print in your like terms and conditions on your instant quote. You could do that. But I would just, you know, just don't throw out the good with the bad. Realize that there's so many more that are going to accept and do good by it. I would probably tighten up your automation sequence for getting the card on file because you had four days when you had seven days before the property was serviced. So whether that be texts and emails to get the card on file and then if they don't get a car file then you don't service them and there's still going to be times when you get a car and file and then it's like overdue or it was fine when they authorized it but then two weeks later it's non sufficient funds. So sorry to ask whether there's a rough timeline for being able to take credit cards on file alongside web website instant quotes. I know it's far out and has a lot to be done. Just curious, CC on file doesn't solve all problems anyways. Have another client who added a card and after one services card declined, reached out and alleged he got evicted and moved out of state. Yes. Like it just really comes down to what, what do you want from the business? Right. Like I think you know, obviously moving to weekly billing would prevent you from doing three services. But again if you were, you know, so hesitant to pause service for a week prior to the first service because you didn't have a car file, I bet you probably would have done three or four services anyways even on weekly billing just for the sake of trying to keep the customer. So it's just like what as you open up a filter in a funnel you and you allow more in, you're going to have more that get weeded out and like bad actors if you open up that funnel, if you add more, add more filters to the funnel like crowd on file, like.

Charging weekly, et cetera, there's just more filters that are going to add a little more friction. You're going to have less people but you'll have less bad actors get through. So it is really this, this is pretty standard in terms of having a card on file from the website. I would hope that by the end of the year we have that set up definitely by next spring rush. That's 100% because there's two ways we can do it. We've looked at both the, the better ways to do it through Copilot versus just doing a stripe form and then we have a like a third party. Like it's a little more complicated if we do it that way. So I'm hoping we can just connect it with Copilot directly.

By the end of the year.

Kyle Tarvin Is it normal for Google Ads to take a few days to start up and get in front of customers? I created Google Ads on Sunday but only have one impression when looking at my need to fix it is showing me I need to add the Google tracker to my website. Other than that, everything else looks good.

Yes, that is normal to take a few days. That's totally normal.

Be careful. Listen to anything with your need to fix because they'll tell you all sorts of stuff. But the dual tracker, like it says on the site, will take five to seven days to usually get set up and actually start registering. But I don't think it has anything with your ads being shown because your ads can be shown regardless. But it usually does take a few days. If it takes more than a week, I would definitely. I'd probably just redo the campaign and see if it goes through. We have had that happen a couple times.

Chad from Valparaiso, Indiana I need help understanding the pricing matrix. Do the budget hours change based on my prices set or is it solely based on the square footage that is put in? Great question. So yeah, budget hours changed based upon your hourly rate that you have. So if you have a certain price. Okay, let me make sure I read this whole question. I'm trying to get a handle on my budget hours based on the price matrix and I need to unknow if it's accurate regardless of my price changes. For example, can I just input all my customer square footage to get B BH for all my recurring customers, or do I need to clock myself over a few weeks and average it out?

Okay, I'm failing to understand your question. Sorry. For example, can I just input all my customer square footage to get BH now? So your price determines your budget hours, right? So if you already have all your prices, divide that by your hourly rate. That will give you your budgeted hours. If you're trying to increase your prices, you're going to do one of two things. You're either going to increase your rate the cost per hour that you're trying to hit for mowing, for example, and by doing that, you will decrease budgeted hours. Right. If you increase the rate that you're charging a customer, you're like, hey, I'm going to charge $90 per hour instead of 80. Great. But if you didn't charge the customer more like their actual price, then you're going to decrease budgeted hours. Right. Typically, what most people do, they increase the price to the customer when they increase prices, and then they just increase budget hours and they leave the rate the same. So there's three factors, right? You have your rate if your budget hours and you have your price. And so if you're moving price up, you're either going to be moving your rate up, like from 80 to 90 per hour, or you're going to be increasing budget hours. So when people say raise prices, be careful because are you raising the price to the customer? Are you raising your hourly rate?

Those are different. If you're moving up just your hourly rate up and not raising the price of the customer, you're actually gonna bring your budget hours down. But if you currently have all your prices in there, Chad, what you're going to want to do is divide that by your hourly rate that you're trying to target for mowing, and that will give you your budgeted hours. I hope that made sense. I might not have understood your question fully, and if not, I apologize.

Bell, Thomas. We got a long question. Here we go. Good morning. My question is regards to price increase. My plan for this year was more of the working GM model. However, I tore my bicep. Oh no. March 29th and had surgery to appear on April 18th. Mercy. Okay, some context for my question. I have two employees and 75 and a half budget hours of recurring mowing. We do level billing and we're about $20,000 per month. We have all the assets we need and they are all over 100 efficient. With level billing, my labor rate goes to 49 in the growing season.

And is 19 in the off season with the same monthly revenue. So we average 33% for the year. Okay, makes sense. Because of my injury, I'm out of the field for a little while and not able to complete many budget hours of my own. So my savings are dwindling away. I'm going to be doing door hangers and one click for mulch, which are jobs I think I can complete before too long. I need to do a price increase, but my guys don't need more budget hours or money really. They're averaging over 8, $300 a week in P4P and are happy. I'm considering a 10 to 15 increase, but I need to keep it all in house so the company can be happy too, not just the team. Members, what are your thoughts on keeping the increased price in house and explaining that is necessary to the team? Would you recommend 10 or 15? Keeping in mind that I'm terrified to do a broad price increase at all. Thank you for I do. Okay.

I would be careful about raising prices and then just withholding a certain percentage before P4P is incurred. I'd be careful with that. It just seems a little bit. It's gonna be harder for the guys to understand. It's another step. What you could do is say, hey, we're gonna decrease the percentages.

But we're going to raise prices.

So you could say, hey, we're raising prices by 15% but we're going to reduce the percentage by 10%. So now you're going to get 45% during the growing season and you're going to get 17% during the off season. However, you know you're going to raise prices by 15% by doing that. They will still make a little bit more, but the vast majority of that price increase will go to you in the business. And I think the way to explain this is open book management. Hey guys, I'm really thrilled everyone's making a bunch of money. Here's the business is doing and in part this is because, you know, I haven't been able to be out there working. But like, ultimately there's not a lot of profit being made. So what we're going to do is we're going to raise prices, we're going to bring these down a couple percentage points. But I'm increasing the cost, the price of the customer by 15. So everyone's effectively going to get like a couple percent raise still. But just that's why we're reducing the percentage. Because if you're giving 49% of your labor rate during the growing season, you're basically, it's still going to be tough to actually make a lot of profit. You're still going to get a lot of your profit in the off season. That's just how it is. So as you get busier right now giving 49 of your of your level billing away, it's still going to be pretty tough in terms of cash flow. You're still going to make a lot of your actual like.

Distributable cash during the off season. So that's fine, that's fine. Because I know you do level billing. Totally fine. It's just a matter of pitching this the crew. I would try my best not to be like, hey guys, I take 10 off the top and then we do P4P because it's another thing they have to calculate in their brain versus just having a percentage of the gross amount they make each day at 75 budget hours per day, two employees, that means that they're being pretty efficient. That's good. If I was you and you could not do any of the actual work, you basically will raise prices to make yourself more profitable and you know, keep things afloat and then I'd go on the offensive in terms of your time being spent on selling, like what you're doing with the door hangers is perfect. Upselling customers, going to every one of the existing hundred 120 customers you probably have and trying to upsell them. I'd be going hardcore with that because I truly believe if you have prices that are increased so you're making more profit and you're at say 80 budget hours by the end of this month on recurring money, you're going to need another employee anyways and you can fill their schedule with the projects that you use for upsells. So if you can get this to say 100 budgeted hours a week with using some projects and obviously you're going to keep getting some million customers over the next month or two, you can easily get another employee and do so profitably if you've raised prices.

So very sorry about that Val. In terms of tearing the bike that kills you in your spring rush that you're going into. So I apologize man. But in terms of you have two solid employees, they're full time with the amount of budget hours they're making great P4P. I'd readjust your percentages a little bit so you can make more profit and then give. That would give you the confidence to get another employee and fill this to say 105, 110 budget hours using projects and then obviously get some mowing probably up to 80, 85 over the next few weeks. That would be my recommendation. Assuming you're trying to grow. If you're in profit mode, you just keep raising prices. The thing is, if you're going to be full time overhead essentially you're going to like only two employees. It's very difficult to make a full time business with enough profit being generated from just two employees. Like there's just. You'd have to have very high prices to actually squeeze enough juice from the orange.

To for just two employees to be able to pay for a full time estimator and salesperson, I. E. You the business owner.

Bill Thomas. I'm using Deep Blonde on my web page in Place of my estimate form when I have calls come in to CC versus the customer going to the website would command server able to use that web form to do over the phone estimates for my level billing? All I have to do is put the address in and the customer info and Deep Lawn pulls the price for my matrix and gives them the price to quote for my if the customer wants hedge trimming embeddings on the property is too or the property is too new to show maps they schedule a drive bike usual no, we can't do that. It's simply just a matter of there I know it seems simple. It's like oh, it's a different type of form. We would make all sorts of mistakes because we can't do it 149 times one way and then one off a different way. So what you can do though is if you want to get the information and throw it into the form on your side on deep blood that's totally fine.

That's if you'd want to do that. But we can't. We can't do it from command center. We all have to use the exact same thing and I and I just can't require every single person to be using Deep Lawn for example.

Davenport is there any discussion on requiring residential clients can is there any discussion on requiring residential clients be charged same day as service and doing monthly billing for commercial crowns across all locations? When I called the customer I posted about in the group yesterday that was the only real complaint she had. Command center defaulted to monthly billing. When our wiki says to invoice after every service and that we only take cards auto charge as payment from past experiences. Customers are willing to pay more overall if we are they are charged weekly instead of monthly because the amount charged per invoice is lower. I think that would be standard practice across the board. The vast majority of locations still do monthly billing. If in the customer qualified what she had customer defaulted. Okay, well you could submit a yellow something Command center dig into this and see what happened here.

If they if you have weekly billing auto charge as payment after every service.

So the invoice after every service I would change that in your wiki to say like daily that it's you're paid daily. You charge customers daily because just say that we invoice after every service. There's you know you just sometimes bi weekly, monthly, weekly. I would just say daily. You know every single day that we do service we charge right after in your week I would change it to that.

But talk to command center. Make sure, that's ironed out in your wiki and very clear and also in your estimate note descriptions and your invoice or estimate like fine print. But feel free to send me yells up and they can look into it. But I would change it in your wiki to be that you you charge daily.

Davenport, is there any ideas for offering financing to clients? Amazon offers the ability to break up charges over a few weeks or months. Is there a service we could use so clients can do the same for us? I'm in growth mode, but this could potentially potentially help those in profit mode as well. Keep up the great work, Mike.

Yeah, so with Copilot they'll have the option to be able to do Buy Now Pay Later. We have most of it finished. I'm gonna guess though by the end of summer it'll actually be ready to roll. A whole bunch of stuff that they have to look through and go through all the security protocols. We rebuilt so much of the site they're gonna have to do it again even though we basically had it done in January.

So that'll be available. We have tracked this and the vast majority of people that use Buy Now Pay later honestly aren't the greatest customers from what I have seen. So I was able to track this two years ago inside Lawn Pro. Very few people use it and the people who do usually it's actually really difficult still to collect from and work for them because if you can't afford a thousand dollar spring cleanup, it's going to be challenging to collect from this person. Obviously the risk falls on the Buy Now Pay later service.

But yeah, usually that same client type of client is also trying to do other things that are a little bit sketchy if they know they can't afford it. So I just say that a lot. If you look a lot of the delinquency rates on Buy Now Pay later, it's pretty brutal right now given where the economy's at. So like at my locations we probably will not offer Buy Now Pay later. But I understand for some people, like especially on bigger projects like big ones, it might be helpful. But again if someone that wants to have a $20,000, you know, project put on Buy Now Pay later where the interest rates are exorbitant.

I just don't know if I want that client anyways in terms of the fact they're living so far beyond that means they're going to get 15, 20 interest on that type of debt instead of getting like using their home equity for 5% or 6%. So anyways, it is coming though to Copilot. It'll be right when they on the estimate, you would have the option to be able to apply for it, link it with your account as an integration and it'd be right next to the invoice or the estimate acceptance. So if they do have financial issues, they would have the ability to be able to apply and get credit through there. So. All right. That's all she wrote for today. All right, everyone, have a fantastic rest of your day. Hope you enjoyed the new lighting and we will see you tomorrow. Take care.