Mike Minutes Mastermind 05/09/2024

All right.

Let'S rock and roll here. Make sure this is all set up correctly.

Okay.

See here, DJ says learned a valuable lesson yesterday. If not, get. If not, if you get the feeling there's a slim chance of success, make it a hard pass. I'm guessing you mean like a new team member.

Those are always fun.

All right.

Let'S jump into questions.

Boom. All right.

Three that came in. Okay, let's roll. Kyle Tarvin, is there a specific cost per click we should be targeting for Google currently sitting at 14 clicks and 16 impressions, $5 cost per click and $72 cost for one conversion. Thoughts on these metrics? Should I be putting more into Google based on these numbers? This is really just too short of a time frame. Like this is probably a matter of a few days to actually evaluate a campaign.

I've seen cost per click be $0.50. I've seen it be $10. I've seen the conversion cost be they get. This morning I saw someone's being at it was $9. And then I've seen some people be at hundreds. So you're gonna have to let this play out a little bit longer than just having 61 impressions. The bottom line is your ad is obviously performing. If you got 61 impressions and 25% of people, ie 14% clicked on the ad, that's pretty phenomenal. And so.

Thing is too, if you are driving traffic to your instant quotes, is that $72 could potentially be an actual customer. So it could actually be your customer acquisition cost.

Because you are going to weed out people that do not even, you know, because, because again, in order for them to actually have submitted to be registering on the Google tag, they will have had to have submitted like accepted the estimate or submitted an estimate request for a landscape job if you have instant quotes. So keep in mind that you, your conversion costs will actually most of the time, if they're doing mowing, be a.

Lead that has been accepted, an estimate has been accepted, which is actually then your customer acquisition cost. So keep that in mind.

Then the second thing I would say is, you know, $72 for customer acquisition costs, not bad. I'd be pouring money on that. If it's just your cost per lead and you're just not doing instant quotes, you know, and you've closed 50% of those, now you're looking at $144 customer acquisition cost, not great. But you know, you can grow a business doing that. So in terms of these metrics, like, I just don't look at anything besides this number like the 14 clicks, 61 impressions, $5 cost per click. I just want to know, am I getting leads? And so that's why, like, I just let this one play out a little bit longer. Also, we found that Google usually takes two to three weeks to actually learn and drive down the cost of that customer acquisition cost or the cost per lead.

I want to say every single location, but just for the sake of making sure I'm accurate, let me say 95% of the locations that we tested, we did ads every single week for the first four weeks. The cost per lead went down just by leaving the ad there and letting Google or Facebook figure out where to give, where to target and who, who to serve that lead up to. I can't, I. Let me say this. I can't think of a single location where the cost per lead went up during the month of April.

By just leaving the ad there and letting it get better and more efficient at who it's tracking. So that's why like, you know, 60 impressions, a few days, you know, 50 to 100 bucks being spent, you're usually not going to get a great.

Sample set. I'd let that same ad run and I would bet, I'm just gonna bet Kyle that if you did that, let that run all of next week, It'll be like a 50 cost per lead. I'm just going to guess just if you let the exact same ad run out.

Thomas Salazar co pilot request from the dispatch board when making or going over the three tabs under the map status crew employees, can we justice software is an existing setting to allow us to finish choosing all our options before automatically refreshing the screen. Example I want to see open status of a particular employee. It refreshes once when I press open then I go so that I employ refreshes twice in this scenario. Sometimes it takes me a while to refresh each time. Especially if my signal is bad or copilot is having episode I like. I'd love for it to allow me to finish choosing all options before refreshing to save some time.

I see what you're saying. I would submit this as a feature request. I'm not going to prioritize this one, but you can submit this as a feature request. It'll be, it'll be as an option.

And then you have to put a button that go like you have to have a button then to actually trigger the refresh.

You couldn't like if you're going to have multiple things that you want to do and then it to refresh, you'd have to have a button that says like refresh.

And then people would complain on the vice versa which is like when I click the drop down I selected employee, I want it to immediately refresh to just that employee. So I don't know if this one would get through. To be perfectly honest with you Thomas. I get where you're coming from though. So like if you can make a good case on the the feature request thing, submit it. It'll get through to eventually being debated. But I'm not going to push this one all the way through because I just don't. I think there's a lot of other people that would complain if we did this to be honest, because they want like when I do a drop down I want immediately it to refresh to just that customer or just to that employee or just to that act, that status of a job for example. But I totally see where you're coming from. Like hey, I want to like kind of like get, do a bunch of things and then see where it's coming from instead of having to wait for it to refresh a few times. I'm just not going to prioritize that one. Nothing against that. I just realized that there's only, there's a finite amount of resources in terms of time that we can put towards these.

All right, this is Mr. Anonymous. What would your recommendation to owners that want 20ish locations by the sounds of it, sale, the franchise locations are going through the roof now. They're not really, no. And from the outside looking in, Lee will be getting pretty busy with those sales. I know you have said it before that you were thinking owners inside of Augusta would begin opening more locations for themselves and multi unit operators is what would push the overall number. Do you think that in the next five to ten years the majority of locations. Augusta locations, if you want a territory next to you, you have to acquire from another owner. Or do you see this push of a thousand locations taking longer? I've never really put a date on the thousand locations. I just know that's kind of like what we would need to make the impact we want to have. But I don't have like a timeline. So longer isn't necessarily a factor in terms of us getting more locations.

The.

Objective value equation of the twelve hundred dollars per month is becoming better and better and especially once we add some stuff that we're going to be doing for Christmas lights that'll be like straight value add for all the owners. Um, like it becomes almost stupid not to join. So I do believe there'll be more people join because of that. Because it's like the math of like just having a website built from us, from longer web design and having P4P. Just if you do those two things, you're looking at 700 bucks a month. So why would not, why would you not pay 1,200amonth and get everything else? And especially as the franchise grows, yet your multiples of individual locations get better. Like for example, if I sold my gym and I was independent, I would probably get about 250000 I think that back I'd probably get 300,000, $300,000. I'd be able to sell it if it's independent. I could easily sell that location, my Anytime Fitness for about $900,000 right now. Simply because it's part of Anytime Fitness. And anyone that buys it knows that they could get trained up and they could immediately get have the systems be running and so, and then you know, they have ads. They create creative for us so we can run the ads. I don't have to worry about having designers and stuff like that. So all this little stuff that they do makes it just so much more worth it as they have grown in size. And then my territory that I purchased for I think 32,000 is now worth 50,000 or $48,000. So if I was to ever sell or someone wanted to come in to your point and like buy out me out that my license is worth like 50% more. So in terms of someone that was wanting to go to 20 locations, I would say the number one thing is two things. One, you're probably going to pause around three to five and figure out GMs. GMs are the hardest thing to figure out. Then what you're going to have to do to go from 3 to 5 to 20 would be you figure out regional managers. And those are two very different levels of management. Different incentives, different quality and type of individual that you'd be targeting.

And.

If you're doing 20 locations, it becomes a matter of systematization and like following exactly the same thing every single time. If, especially if you're gonna do in the same area, like if you're going to do different areas. So like when I had Washington and North Carolina Flames are slightly different from a cash flow perspective was actually kind of nice because, because everything was offset. But then from a operational standpoint I can't tell everyone the exact same time to send out one click estimate emails. I can't tell everyone to do the exact same text blast or service offering or upsells, it's because the markets are so different. So at 20 locations, you're going to start getting spread out enough to where little things like that might have to change. So for example, you might be on a different side of a mountain range. So all of a sudden the weather changes, different types of grass, like 20 locations start to become where you're probably 100 miles apart from each other at or more. And so it becomes like, okay, well this area is like way more wealthy. Like we do way more projects over here. We need mostly mowing. So when you start getting 20 locations, you've spread yourself out to enough to where now you have different markets and you start to feel the impact that even the same systems and procedures done in different markets require changes be due to seasonality, changes due to your general manager. Like one location right next to another one with more of a sales driven. This one will double and triple in size. This one will really struggle to get anywhere in terms of growth. And so getting to three locations is probably, I would say is a magnitude, an order of magnitude harder than going from 3 to 20. Like 3 locations. Getting from 1 to 3 will take most entrepreneurs 10 years. Anyone that does it faster than that, they are very, very skilled at entrepreneurship and leadership. Because going from one to two is very difficult. Going to three, another massive step, very, very difficult. Going from three to 20, it becomes a matter of can you find regional managers? So like if you say, okay, I'm at three, I want to go to five, you're probably going to hire a great regional manager to manage those five. And then your job becomes, okay, let me go find another regional manager that can manage my next five. And usually what you'd be doing the same way we do with team members out in the field and promoting them to working GM is you'd eventually get a GM that's like, hey, they're great. I'm going to make them into a regional manager. So that's what I've always done is what I recommend. If you're finding a working gm, pull it from your team members out in the field. You have a track record of their performance. They know how the systems work, they know about the brand, and usually that's your highest performers. So.

Learned a valuable lesson that if you get the feeling there's a slim chance of success, make it hard pass. Oh, you made a customer. Customer with unobtainable expectations. Unrealistic. Oh yeah, man, yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, it is a matter of seeing a pattern enough to where eventually, like, okay, this one Checks all the boxes of being unrealistic.

Yeah, there's, there's a. There's like Matt Rife. He's a comedian. He does a show called Red Flags where he had a special called Red Flags. We could definitely do our own special on Red flags just for lawn care. Landscaping companies, like, for example, the customer that specifies to the quarter inch of what, what height their grass wants to be mowed before you even give them an estimate.

Red flags.

Asking that the lot, the backyard lawn be mowed only occasionally upon request. Like, there's like a bunch we could go through. I'm sure there's some really funny ones. We thought about it. How do I deal with what I believe is a good idea, but I'm not the level necessary to prove it? Example, I see the method that you implemented and has been successful. I see the method that you implemented and has been successful. But because I'm not there yet, do I wait, just wait years to prove it or can I talk to my brothers and see if they are interested?

Okay. I'm not exactly sure what you're trying to prove, so let me go. Based upon what you've given me.

Your track record is the greatest proof that you'll need, you need in life. So if you have a good idea, implement it and then let the track record be the proof.

So if someone says they're a great entrepreneur, like, you can tell everyone in the world and try to prove it to them and tell them and convince them.

But if you just go, go create a great business, that'll be the proof that's required.

In order to be able to say you're a great entrepreneur. If you say that you have great sales ability. The greatest way to be able to prove that to anybody is to have a track record of being able to sell over and over and over again in every situation. If you want to say you're a good leader, well, how do I prove that? In hard situations, what do you do?

And so I would just, I would just say in general, like, I'm not exactly sure what you're talking about here, but like I would say in general.

Use words as your last resort when you're trying to prove anything to somebody. Ideally you use track record and you facts and figures and things that have been historical evidence and, and undeniable proof, as Alex says, that would be the proof I'd be looking for.

I hope that was helpful. That was a bit of a vague question, a bit of a vague answer, but I'm happy to dive into it more later. If you ask again. All right, I hope you all have a fantastic day. A little shorter episode here on Thursday. I'll see you all on Friday. And I'm doing a webinar on the Saturday. It's the first one I've done very long time. Really haven't gone hard on getting more locations until recently and so really want to zone this in, hone this in. There's nothing new that's going on the webinar, by the way. It's the exact same offer. There's no discounts that are happening compared to everyone else that's ever joined. This is actually really a way for me to hone in my pitch. I need to learn and I haven't done it for four or five years now. So I'm going to hone it in a little bit and. And ultimately I want to get more locations so we can continue to drive customer acquisition costs down. And if I can do it, I think if I can do it right, we can get there a lot faster. And so we're doing a two prong approach. One prong, improving value. There's some really cool stuff we're trying to do around winter services and Christmas lights, et cetera, that we'll be showing later this summer. Again, completely optional. You don't have to do it if you don't want to, but I think it'd be super valuable and we're working on some big projects around that. The second side is to get more locations. Actually like think about selling and how do we actually package it in a way that people is presentable to people. And I just generally believe that if we're going to give someone's initial feedback over the course of them being in the systems, that the twelve hundred dollars per month.

Is well warranted just based upon the values currently being provided, let alone the stuff we've been adding. And so that's really I'm zeroing in on. So if I can sell more locations and improve the customer brand awareness and drive all our customer equity costs down, great. I've heard a lot of really good stuff about everyone that is doing the tracking their conversions on Google and Facebook. Very happy about that. I was talking to Nick, he was having like a, what was it, 10, 15, $20 cost per lead the other day. First time he's actually tracked his conversions from Google and Facebook. So he might make a video. He said later next week or something like after he's had a whole week of data. But you know, great job for everyone. Has executed on that so quickly and just crushing it makes me super happy. And so we'll continue to make some more versions of that and if there's things that pop up as some some of you already have in the Facebook group throughout the process, setting up those campaigns, etc. Definitely let us know every time it seems like based on someone's Google account or Facebook account looks slightly differently. So we'll try to get through get you through that as much as possible. Hopefully save you having to pay management fees, but still be able to get really good tracking on cost per lead. And just keep in mind if you're driving directly to your website, which is what I recommend, that a lead, a conversion is actually usually almost a customer is almost always a customer, especially if you're pitching mowing. Because if they're coming for a mowing quote and when they come there, they're not seeing like triggering the tag or triggering the code snippet until they have a click accept. And then they go to the thank you page. And the thank you page is where that tag is sitting. So keep that in mind when you're looking at cost per lead, et cetera is if you're getting that thank you page is as likely if you do instant quotes, it's an accepted customer. So justify that when you're looking at your cost per cost per lead or your cost per conversion. So all right, love you all. Hope you have a fantastic Thursday. We'll see you tomorrow. Take care.