Mike Minutes Mastermind 05/08/2023

Hey, everyone. Hope you're doing super well. Let's go ahead and get things kicked off.

One quick announcement. I'm 100% finalized on this, but I want to make sure it's on everyone's radar in terms of scheduling and planning. And that is for our.

Sorry, let me just drop this in here for our Augusta Nation only part of the conference in October.

I was thinking originally we'd go late Tuesday night after everyone else, but we're all gonna be super exhausted. I'd rather just have dinner with everyone and we kind of enjoy ourselves. And then my plan is that Wednesday morning. I've been trying to find hotels for ages. However, Brad had a good idea and I was why not use a church? And sure enough, there's a cathedral like three blocks away from the Omni Hotel that rents out their sanctuary. And it's pretty cool. And we are potentially going to get it for Wednesday morning. That way you could stay Tuesday night at the hotel, walk over to the church from like probably 8 to 11:30 or so, just doing Augusta conference talk stuff. And then at 12 o', clock, equip expo starts. So you could just go over there, head over there. So I'm going to try to get a discount code for everyone for Equip Expo to use for your tickets. And then also.

Once I confirm that Wednesday morning, I'll let everyone know, put a post on the dashboard, etc. But that's where my head's at. And Brad kind of alerted me to the idea that churches are not going to be under the moratorium of all the hotels are at. So I just cannot get anything else outside of the Omni Hotel. And when, as soon as Wednesday comes, they lock that one up too. So. All right, let's go and jump into questions.

There we go, Mastermind. There he is. Okay, share.

Cool. I have a couple other changes that are going to come down the pipe. I'm going to be running by the Franchise Advisory Council this week. And so some good stuff I think coming. But I wanted to run it by them first. First. And then I will next week make some more announcements. Let's jump into questions.

All right, there you go.

Cool. All right, first one, Kyle Tarvin. We just had one of our ramp rack trucks blow ahead. I just talked with the shop and they are telling me that it's very difficult to find used engines for my truck and it won't. And it would run $14,000 for an engine swap. Basically told me that it won't run for much longer as it's Leaking fuel into the coolant and we eventually grenade itself to death. I don't have 14k to replace the engine, nor do I have a spare 8 to 9k to get a new truck and paint with decals. That's insane. Why is the engine so much. That's nuts. Sounds like we may need to go back to doubling up our crews on the trucks and try to limp along for the rest of the year until we can afford to get another truck. Yeah, like I would definitely not spend 14k on engine swap unless that vehicle has like 40 or 50,000 miles on it and you got like a good transmission and everything else is working great. But yeah, if you can, you can go get a pretty good truck for 14 grand that's has everything else that's less miles. So. That stinks, man.

Devin, Happy Monday. How do you convert P4P to payroll to QuickBooks? Just manually add to the reports. It's my first time. Yeah. So in terms of, in the reports you're going to have the number of hours and then you have the payroll bonus. So you're just going to do in QuickBooks or Gusto, whatever you're using the number of hours paid at their base pay and then anything in performance dollars will be marked as bonus. So in terms of running it in QuickBooks, you're just going to run it as if their hourly rate is the base pay.

And any performance dollars or payroll bonus is added as a bonus on the paycheck.

Kyle Tarvin, when you're scheduled, when you schedule your cruise, do you base your budget their budget hours off of six or eight budget hours they're able to get in a day? We have always done 10 to 12 hour days, but I'm finding we are burning our guys out. So I like to go back to eight hour days and get them off at 3pm yeah, so we always use 75%. So on a 40 hour, someone working 40 hours in the week, we're gonna assume 30 budgeted hours is what can get completed. If they crush it. Yeah, go done sooner. And yes, during like July, August, September when they're going really fast, we put more than 30 budget hours on there. But that's what we kind of like schedule and plan for is 30. And if we're pleasantly surprised, then it's okay. But it gives you a little bit of leeway to increase in terms of if someone calls out, et cetera. Yeah, we use, we use 75% efficiency which is 30 budget hours out of every 40, which is six budget hours out of every eight in a day.

Max Harwood from Burnaby Employee training period Usually employees at my locations are in a training period for two weeks where they earn only the base rate and work alongside other team members. Therefore, thereafter they are eligible for P or P and usually start working solo. I found that the two week training period can be a little short with some employees and I'm considering extending to one month plus at the end of that period I would ask the current employees to vote in the unanimously if they want the new employee to start to be part of the team. Sometimes the guys have a better read on the new employee because they are spending a decent amount of time with him and they would allow them as an official allow them an official meanings of voting for or against the new candidate. You're going to have a lot of problems as you scale because as you scale you get 11, 12 employees, et cetera. Even six or seven, you're gonna have people that just don't get along super well or they, they don't like someone for whatever reason, like they were born and at a certain time of the year and they just don't like it or whatever. And so you're gonna have problems when it comes to the voting new employees in.

There's a reason why most small businesses should be ran like a dictatorship and that's because you need, you need to, to make progress instead of having everything being ran through as a democracy.

And then secondly, I would say that I would recommend if you're going to do the one month training period, that's fine, but let them be on P4P. Like don't lock them in on base rate because if someone's really good, they give them the incentive on PvP. They're probably going to hit base pay anyways. But don't, don't lock them into that. You can just set them up for the expectation that hey, you're probably going to hit base pay for the next, for the first couple paychecks. That already happens with us too. But we don't tell them that they're going to be at base pay because we want them to be able, if they crush a job or like a two or three day project, they knock it out in their first month. I want them to get that taste of P4P the sooner the better. And so we set them up the expectation they might not hit base above base pay for the first few paychecks. However, I want them to see on a daily basis in the reports they're like oh man, yesterday I made an extra 60 bucks. They might not actually see it on the paycheck because the next three days they're really slow and they're still learning. But I want them to get the taste of P4P as quickly as possible. So I personally would not make someone locked in on base pay for training period. I just set the expectation that on P4P they're probably going to hit base pay for the first few pay periods. But this last part works great until you have about four or five guys because otherwise too you're going to get people disagreeing. And then it's a matter of like what if you really need an employee and you really like somebody and they're a great worker, but one person doesn't like them for whatever reason and they say they don't want. Now what are you going to do? You're going to. You're going to alienate the person that voted against them and put them on the team when you need them. You're way behind so you just gotta, you know, the speed at which you execute will get slowed down if you try to make everything democracy and obviously you want to make sure that you involve your team and make them feel heard etc. But, but there's a certain level if you do that too often, especially once you cross five or ten employees, your. Your speed at which you can operate and execute extremely limited.

That's why China has grown so fast. Lake Geneva There was an error for my estimate form on the website. Most of the leads I did not receive until Friday, weeks after the customers fill out the contact form. My question is should I reach out to the customers and let them know there was an error and see if there's. Okay, so I have not heard about this coming from the website. What I'm guessing is happening is this the automation from Service Autopilot notifying you if you could reach out to me personally on this. If this is actually you're saying this is the estimate form being delayed because we have not seen this.

I'm guessing this is the automation from service all part because we've been seeing them doing a bunch of batching stuff like this. But if it's weeks, my goodness, I haven't heard that it's been that bad. There's about 12 I've estimates I've received on Friday. Okay, so there's only 12. Okay, so that's not so bad.

But.

Yeah, please if you want to email me franchiseguestlongservices.com that'd be great. Let me know if this is if you're Saying this is the estimate form from the website or is this the notification from service autopilot and we're seeing the same thing too like we'll get notified that an estimate was completed and it was really completed like 24 hours ago or 2 days ago so it's just super intermittent. I don't know when to say it's good and when it's not. It's just sometimes it's happening in service all part right now it seems to batch them occasionally.

And so send me an email let me know if it's the estimate form that's definitely not happening to everyone's so please let us know we can diagnose it, jump into your site and see what's going on potentially but I think this is probably more of an automations thing. Oh look at this, we got a picture.

Loading, loading, loading.

This is going into.

A form.

Yeah I have a feeling this has more to do with whatever you have set up with the form, the import or the form because we're getting the actual.

I'm guessing yeah this is, I'm guessing this is the estimate request form from your website and not like a Facebook ad. So we're not getting this where they, when they're coming into us being delayed. So I'm wondering if you have some, something set up like in Zapier or something that you're trying to convert them from there and bring them over to a form of some sort that might be where there's a gap or a leg but feel free to email me. I don't mind taking a look at it and I just, I just know to my knowledge it is not on the website because we're getting the forms directly at command center. Fine.

All right, let's see what else we got here.

I would 100 get a second opinion on the truck. I had two engine swapped last year and they cost that roughly combined. Yeah, I, I've typically only seen for unleaded fuel like 7, $8,000 as like a head cap for.

For an engine swap like 14, 15, 20,000. That's like diesel engine material right? So unless this is a diesel. Maybe it's a diesel.

But yeah I've never seen more than 6, $7000 for a decent engine so yeah I would second that get a second opinion coming from someone who has absolutely no opinion on that because I don't know trucks at all.

Everyone have a fantastic week and we'll see you tomorrow. Take care.