Mike Minutes Mastermind 05/10/24

Hello, Guess Nation. Hope you are doing well.

Let's go ahead and get started. I think everything in Facebook, we're good to go. Cool.

Announcements. And then there's only one question looks like in the form. So I will get to that.

A couple things. First off today, Ken Lynn, out from Michigan, is on the show on the Public Channel. He was the only one from Augusta that wanted to be on the turnaround or applied, I should be, should say, to be on the turnaround show. So he's going out today. I appreciate him being so vulnerable. He was very open and transparent about the struggles he's faced and, you know, keep butting up against kind of 100k and really struggling to break through that. So I highly recommend, if anyone else is in that situation, today's episode that's on the Public Channel would be beneficial in terms of me working through him. Me working through things with him. And so definitely recommend that. So thank you, Ken, for being open, social and transparent. You know, just being himself and sharing his struggles and personal capacities that are keeping him back from that. So that's the first thing. Okay, let's go to the next thing.

Which order do I want to do this in? Let me do the announcement first and then I'll do the education part next. Okay. So the big announcement for today is. I just confirmed it like a few minutes ago from a legal perspective. That's why I've been waiting. I'd mentioned to the Franchise Advisory Council a couple weeks ago or last week that we were working on something I've kind of hinted at a couple times because it's been a bit of a process, and that is that we are going all in on Christmas lights for the winter. The amount of revenue that we drop off in this industry as a whole. But Augusta Nation specifically, who I care about, is abhorrent and we will never be able to hit 30 profit margins if we keep having where for three months of the year, the vast majority of Augusta barely breaks even.

Or something. A big chunk of us lose money. So working a bunch on this. And so I want to announce it today, mostly due to the fact that as we roll out all of this training for Christmas nights, et cetera, I know people get inspired and they start going and hiring agencies or they go hire, you know, build their site and things like that. We are going to take on a lot of that effort for you. So we're going to be working on a completely. A branded site from Augusta, a completely different website. It's going to be augustalights.com it's going to look exactly like our logo, except instead of saying lawn care services, it's going to say Christmas lights in red.

I know it seems like a very small thing and it is. We can make the change on the design team in a matter of a few hours.

Massive legal implications here because we're part of a franchise and we need a national and then international trademark. And to protect it, there's a few reasons why we do this. Number one, like I said, the seasonal revenue, very, very important.

The other part of this is when the SEO team, Tori, myself, etc, jumped in there. This market is wide open. We can crush this SEO.

I think in part because it's such a seasonal business. Like we're talking two to three months out of the year where you're busy, there's no one dominating this. It is so wide open. When we saw what we were looking at, we can crush this like from an SEO perspective, Like if someone in your market is searching Christmas lights, we are so confident that's in a matter of a few months we will be on the top. It's insane because like people don't spend a ton on other venues. Like so for example, in lawn care landscaping, because we're busy for eight to nine months out of the year, you got companies like Angie's List, Yelp, et cetera, that really, really rank well and spend a lot of money to drive traffic. We can crush this, this market, we can absolutely crush it. So this is going to have at no cost to any of the owners that want to opt into this. They'll be completely optional. It'll come from the dashboard where you'd be able to sign up to get your website built. We would do. It usually takes us about four to five weeks.

We are hoping to have this rolled out by July where it's the ability to opt in and then our hope is that if you opt in, we can get it done by August. So that way you're able to actually start once the summer lull comes, start really gearing up for Christmas lights and obviously we have webinars and trainings etc throughout the rest of the the summer starting next week, if you haven't seen it already. I'll send another reminder probably early next week. The the founder of Certified Lights, who's our partner on this, is going to be kicking us off and really showing the business case for like buying your lights, leasing them out first year, what your projections can be second year, etc and really giving a clear business plan for that.

I know that I've talked to A lot of inside of Augusta Nation and outside. And I'm pretty confident that if you use strategies, a hundred thousand dollars in your first year of Christmas lights is possible. You know, you know, doing 100, 120 houses. And so we are going to be building augustalights.com it's going to look the same in terms of the logo. Max will look the same but it'll be Augusta Christmas lights. From a legal perspective, we are getting trademarks in the U.S. we will then have to go to Canada and Australia. It takes a while for that because goes to get granted but we can get provisional one so we can all be in business. I'm trying to see if we all need to sign re sign a franchise agreement to so that we all are covered locally so someone can't just come knock you off locally. And then I don't have legal grounds because your current FTD does not include that trademark. So I'm working through the legal part of it. But from like the marketing perspective, we've been already working on this. So we already own augustalights.com where we start working on the brand side of things. This is coming again. This is zero cost to anyone. No one's paying for anything. So I figured that the way that we will pay for this is sell more locations and we will do that by providing this type of value. So I'm very confident that we can crush the SEO. Like literally, I was like timid about this a few months ago when we started working on it. And then when we started getting the SEO, like these other sites that are being built around Christmas sites, we can crush them. There's no one like long hair and landscaping. There's some people that know what they're doing on SEO. There's agencies built around it, et cetera. The people that do Christmas lights site building a lot of times are one off people like one person, young guy just building landing pages and things. There's no one that's really built a national brand around this at all. We can crush on SEO. And so when I saw just like the opportunity there to do that and the fact that we are serving a market that has a lot of expendable income when you're talking about Christmas lights. And I believe that you'd be better off spending $200 customer acquisition cost, getting a Christmas light customer and then upselling them on mowing and other services the rest of the year, I think it's a really good trade. And so this is, you know, whoever's getting Christmas lights put on their house for $1,000 their prime customer for mowing or any other service we provide. So anyways, all that to say come July that will be rolling. I'm hoping by end of June, but probably July that will be available from the dashboard where you can just clearly check a box and that would trigger everything to be set off in terms of us building the site for you. It'd look like augustalights.com your territory name. And it would look very, it would look very. The branding would carry over from Augusta Lawn care services to augustalights.com again, completely optional. I don't want to do Christmas lights. You're good, don't worry about it. I believe that the vast majority of Augusta will eventually do Christmas lights after seeing just a lot of the numbers. And I've really, really dug into this industry knowing just how wide it open is on the line and how few people are actually doing a good job of marketing this. So next week the kickoff event for an online webinar is going to happen. And then every few, every month they're doing a live webinar for us from Certified Lights. They also have built the whole site out for us in terms of augustalighting supply.com which gives us all access to discounts, training webinars in person, training, pricing information, and the list goes on. So several of the owners inside our guest nation have already used Certified Lights. And I know a lot of people have already done Christmas lights, but I believe that this is a way to prevent us from having to spend quite a bit of money on acquisition. And I know a lot of people like go out and get agencies to build them sites or build landing pages or run ads for them, et cetera. And so that is the plan. It'll be coming out in June and then July should be available to everyone, hoping by August we can have all your sites built. I'm working with Tory and the team on a lot of those aspects. But our Achilles heel, when I look at our financials from all the unit metrics, unit economics, is this winter. That three month window just crushes us. And if we can solve that, I think we'll be in a much better spot for all of Augusta Nation in terms of cash flow. Okay, I'm gonna jump to education and then do the one question that's in the form. All right, so that was the announcement. Woohoo. All right.

Delegation. Okay, I have a little thing I was thinking about. There's one reason why people don't get to $500,000 in annual revenue. That one reason is they don't delegate stuff.

Whether it be micromanagement tendencies, whether it be the fact that you're really, really strong in areas other than sales, whether it be not being able to trust employees, et cetera.

The inability to delegate will keep you from building a $500,000 business. Why is that so important?

Yesterday I looked over with Lee, you know, who, who hasn't been able to. To scale their businesses out of guys who started out zero, not been able to grow, and eventually left. Every single person did not pass the first stage of wealth, which is growing to $500,000 in annual revenue. Every single person did not pass the third stage of growth, which is great business. Pass $500,000 in annual revenue. The answer to that is laid out inside the stages of growth. Until you're past $500,000 an annual, you are susceptible. I'm not saying your business can't be profitable. It can be at 2, 300. There's plenty of owners that are like, hey, I'm at 250, 300, and I'm making really good money, great. But you are susceptible. You're susceptible to you getting hurt.

Economic tides, something in your market going crazy, two employees walking off the job, and now you're in a bad spot. You're susceptible. Not to say you can't be profitable, not to say you don't run a business or anything demeaning. It is simply that you are susceptible because at $500,000 in annual revenue, if something bad happens, you can afford to raise prices by 20% immediately, make an extra hundred thousand dollars in margin, and go hire a general manager and go into profit mode. And so if you look at the stages of growth, stage one, two, and three, all I simple simply say is focus on close ratio, not on profit margin. The reason is because there are owners that within a matter of three months go from zero to 500,000 and get through three stages of growth. And other people will take three to five years to get to those stages. And that's fine. You are more susceptible to failure. When you are growing at a, at that smaller size and you're in stage 200,000 to 500,000, you're very, very susceptible because you can't afford. If bad happens to the business.

And, and raising your prices is great.

But it's not going to be able to pay for a general manager, which means if you have to walk away from the business, if you have to leave because of a family emergency sickness, things happen in life. You can't afford it. And so this is not to be demeaning to people who have less, doing less than 500,000. And I know some people, when they come to train, it's like your first stage of wealth is getting past 500,000. Yes, it is. Because in my opinion, your business is very susceptible until that point. And it's simply in the metrics and the numbers. Like the only people, the only people that have, have ever joined Augusta tried to grow their business and not been able to have quit. The only ones are the ones that did not get past 500,000. It'd be likely to say 300,000, but I know for a fact they didn't pass 500,000. And so I hate making like.

Unobtainable goals for people. I really hate that. I hate that feeling like, oh, you just got to do more and more. I don't like that. But I simply have to look at the numbers and see who made it and who did not. And so the reason I say all of that is delegation of everything besides sales and hiring is what gets you past 500, 000. Right. And that's why when it comes to something like command center or for example, cleaning out your trucks, one of your employees, all of those things should be delegated unless they rhyme with sales and hiring. If you're under 500,000, if you're actually sprinting towards and you're like, well, I don't have the revenue. Like, I don't have the cash to be able to do that. Here's the thing. If you're cleaning out your trucks right now, trust me, I did. I was the worst at this. I've cleaned out trucks. Until you're doing like a million plus in revenue, you're cleaning out your trucks. And you can go get someone else to do that for $20 an hour in cash on the weekends, a high schooler. The question is, is your time worth more than $20 per hour if you are doing door hangers and door knocking? Well, let's run the math. If we can get one customer every two hours, door knocking or holding a sign next the road like, it boggles my mind. Like Marcus Dell, hold the sign on the side of the road, got two leads in an hour, holding a sign, your time would be better spent holding that sign. Let's just say your lead, you're willing to pay 40, $50 a lead. If you get two of those an hour, you're doing an 80 to $100 an hour test. Standing on the side of the road getting leads compared to cleaning out your truck or answering your phone or doing Something other little small in the business. And so.

I say this because I want you to win. I am only incentivized for you to stay in business. That's ultimately how Augusta we came to conclusion of being a flat fee instead of royalties. I am incentivized to you for you to stay in business. So keep that. I do have a massive incentive for you to stay in business. Secondly, the only people that have ever failed, the only people have ever quit are the ones that haven't got past that marker. And then the question is, how do we get to that marker? How we get to that marker was you delegate everything, every single thing besides sales and hiring. It's the only thing that things that matter and the only things will get you past 500,000. After that, look at stage four and five of growth inside the book. That's when you start getting an office person. That's when you start really getting maniacal about how your trucks are handled and making sure everything's standardized. And the equipment and the tools and the truck, everything's lined up. Because now you have scale. And actually optimizing at that size makes it worth your time. But until that point, it should only be focused on sales and hiring. Answering your text messages inside of copilot isn't a great use of your time. That's why command center exists, because it needs to get done. It's. It's not like you can like, push the truck washing off to next week. Like, they have to be answered. Use it like crazy. Because then you get past 500,000 and you're like, hey, I want to optimize. I want to make it better. I want to get my own office person. Fantastic. Now you can.

So I, when I saw that math the other day, I'm like, okay, everything needs to revolve around two things. One, people that run out of cash during the winter. That's gonna be Christmas. Number two, everything must be optimized on getting people past 500,000 in revenue. Because if they do that, any crisis that happens, they can usually weather it simply due to the fact that they have the scale and size. If they raise prices, they can cover a general manager. They can walk away from the business. They have to. They're forced to. And the business won't fail. And I am incentivized for you to stay in business. And I truly believe the reason that's. That's an important incentive is because entrepreneurs simply will win if they don't quit. Eventually, you will win if you don't quit. The thing is how do I reduce the chances of you quitting and how do I reduce the risks of you quitting? Is getting you past 500,000. And if that's the goal, so that if, if you get sick, if there's something bad happens, a truck breaks down, you don't go out of business. You have the ability to pull a lever of price and immediately go into profit mode and make up a massive delta of profit that can then be used to be able to fund a general manager, pay for the truck, et cetera.

And then, you know, and then realizing that there's some things even as you grow in scale, like for myself, even, like, you gotta keep delegating as you scale up the size of the business. Now, your value of your time, like, you shouldn't be holding the sign the side of the road. If you're running a million dollar business, holding a sign the side of the road, getting two leads an hour, you should go delegate that to someone that crushes and like, loves dancing with the science, put them on the side of the road, and then give them $10 extra per lead that they get. They could be making 30, 40 bucks an hour.

By the way, the signs.

Pretty sure at least two of them have been put up. We've added a whole bunch of the boards to the pro shop. I think there's at least 1, potentially 3 now, if not yesterday, today they're going up and we're adding a couple more because like, hey, they're working. If you can get two leads an hour holding a sign next to the side of the road, I'm sorry. There is no excuse, there is no excuse to be washing your truck. There is no excuse to be twiddling your thumbs at any point in time of the year. Figure out which of those boards is your service for each time of the year. Like, I don't have money to spend on marketing. Michael, I think I appreciate the done for you ads. Don't have any money. Great. Can you hold a sign next to the side of a road? I just want to see you win. And I do believe that if you have about 300 to 400 leads, you can get a hundred recurring mowing customers. You can get enough projects to get past 500,000 annual revenue. The question should be, how do I get to 300, 400 leads? Do I hope and pray and I twirl my thumbs and send it home? No, you will have to hold signs. You'll have to door hangers. You'll have to knock on doors.

And. And as you scale up, you'll continue to delegate. So, for example, my locations, the five that I had in North Carolina and sold to. To Connor before, as we were going in January, we were already considering. Okay. Now as collective, we're well over a million in. In revenue. We should. We should get someone, one person for at least four to six months of the year to be able to handle stuff. Because as a collective for they'll be able to do enough tasks that will save money in comparison to a command center. And the efficiency will go from like 80% to 95%, which is great. That's why it's nice. Nice to have your own office person.

So we were already planned that, then handed off. Connor, Kayla, his wife, fantastic. She came to training. Let's go. She's building their office. But again, they're very wise and diligent how they're doing this. Shout out to Kayla and Connor. They had calls, they booked calls with Command Center. You can do it from the dashboard and they just pay for the minutes they use. And literally you could have your office trained by each department of Command center by just using that tool, like, probably for a thousand dollars. You literally could have your people like, hey, here's all the training you're doing. Anything once a week, you're gonna have an hour call. You can literally book them with each department at Command center if you want to, right? And then they realized, hey, payroll and P4P too complicated for us to take in house. Let Command center do it. That's smart. Because instead of them grinding and trying to figure it out and trying to hire people and then train them for months to get them efficient on payroll and running paper performance, just let Command center do it, right? Look at them as a tool of like, here are all the tasks I can delegate at Command Center. Here are the ones I can do better than them. Here are the ones I can afford to do myself. Here are the ones I eventually hire because I have a larger business. And then only use the ones that are helpful for you to delegate at a. At a. At a thing that it's too hard to train someone else. It is inefficient for you to do or you don't do a good job at it, right? And then as you grow your business, your personal net worth, your personal income, you're simply looking for every single task in life that you will have to delegate. And sometimes it seems. I'll be honest, like, I know for. For a lot of people just getting started, this seems like way far off. You're probably five to 10 years away from what I'm about to talk about. And that's fine. This is the stages of wealth. I'm talking about stage seven right now. You're in stage one. The only thing I've stuff I've said so far is relevant to you. Let's speed up forward. Like stage seven. Stage seven is everything I do in my life needs to be delegated. If it's lower the task like what I should be focused on. So for example, for myself, what I should be focused on is like all this stuff with the Christmas light thing. Massive lever for a guestination, Getting more locations, drive our customer acquisition cost and pay for these sort of things that we're doing with the Christmas lights. Massive, massive lever. Writing the book. Massive lever. Right? Doing the course for the book. Massive lever. These are the things that I focus on because those are the most important tasks for me to focus on. Hiring great engineers. Also a massive like very important thing for me because there's so much tech that I deal with. Anything other than that, including like cleaning your house, doing your laundry, all of that needs to be delegated. And it seems super bougie, especially if you don't come from a lot of money. Like, you know how it was for me, like someone's gonna come pick up my laundry and clean it, I'm gonna like they're gonna come clean my house. Like, it doesn't take that long. But if I keep doing tasks I can pay someone else to do for 20 or 30 an hour, guess what? I'm not doing the tasks that are worth far more. So. All right, I went on a little bit of a tangent there. Let's go to some question. Jellyfish. What's a jellyfish? Did I spell something wrong on the text message? Oh.

I'll have to see. What did I text? Did I text something out wrong? High value for all of a destination. Please watch. I don't think I mentioned jellyfish. Okay, we're good. We're good.

With the Christmas light specific website. Will we need to get reviews specifically upset or will it be connected to our current business listing somehow? Great question, Great question. There's a couple options and we're going to test them out over the next couple months. It's challenging because we don't have Christmas lights actually done. So I will have a very determined answer for you, Brent, by the end of this, this winter. What likely is going to happen now is you will have the option to go start a new Google listing under Augusta Lights because the branding will look totally separate or you could change your business name on your current Google listing to Augusta Lawn Care and Christmas Lights for the winter season. You could do that too. Keep in mind there's probably a 5% chance they're going to ask you to re verify. I would be inclined to go start a new Google listing with a gust of Christmas lights because that's how the branding is going to look. It's going to be a completely different website and everything. I would be inclined to do that. In terms of reviews, we are probably going to just pull from your existing site because if we use that that portal it looks exact same. They mentioned Augusta, they say great things about you, etc.

But it is probably a good idea to get your own Christmas lights etc ranking and then tie it to that website. And then once that's done, probably down the road we would then have the option for you to integrate that other account into your website.

Great. Mastermind education portion. We just talked about this in Bloomington this morning. Let's go. Cool. All right, let's go into questions. I think there's one I saw in here. Oh, it's bounced up to 3. Inflation at its best. Okay, let's make sure we're good. That's lined up there. Boom, boom.

Will there be a done for you ads made for the Christmas lights for this year's ads campaign? Of course, Josh. Of course. I will have to test things though. So.

Like the current ad done for ads would work in terms of setting up, but it'll probably be October, November before like I haven't. I've done enough testing or like use this text, use this picture, etc. I'm also hoping, Josh, that we can test out something, that we would do it for you and we just charge a set dollar amount per lead.

And so I'm just seeing if that would work and making sure that it would actually be beneficial as an option because I know a lot of people have done that in the past with Christmas light days. Pay someone per lead to get leads for them. All right, this is from Mr. Lee Park. Oh, okay. Asking on behalf of a new owner. Aaron Miller, Abbotsford, B.C. welcome to Augusta. A friend of mine wants out of the landscaping business. He wants to sell 49 customers that get regular mowing services plus other projects on top. All Weekly cuts are $60 per cut or more. He said he has a couple small ones at maybe 50 to $55 per cut. He wants 20k. Seems a bit high, but he said they're all tight routes. What do you think? Well, $20,000. It's gonna be $400 divided by 49. So you have $408 per customer. So my question to you is, can you spend $408 and get a customer? I also assume that 49 are going to stay. I think that you'll lose at least 9. So then your customer acquisition cost goes to 500. That's getting a little steep compared to the fact that right now we are getting leads on Facebook and Google for 30 to 50.

I personally would not do this. If you're in massive amounts of growth mode, I could make sense of maybe paying 10 or 15. But for 49 customers, that will probably get whittled down to 40.

Assuming all the pricing is good, I wouldn't pay more than 10 grand.

Ken Lynn, more clarification from yesterday's question. You had switched most of your trucks at Bellingham location to trailer setup. And now a few years later, there are companies I've never heard of that are using trailers. It still gets the job done, but it's a whole new way of thinking about it. I have a few of those too, and they work for me. But I'm not that at the level that I believe I can convince others to do the same. I'm afraid of telling people my methods because it may come across as arrogant or unproven. Yeah, I know they work. How should I approach this? Build a massive business using trailer setup to prove the trailer setup fork.

Like we said yesterday, let the evidence do the talking. The proof of the work do the talking. Kenlyn, an example. I do not charge people the dollar per minute per man for initial modes. When I tried that in the past, I get too much pushback when they get the bill. So instead I still charge the same amount, but I tell them it's a cleanup. Not sure how long it's going to take. I tell them it's two to three times your weekly rate. Sometimes I'm charging more than $1.50 per minute per man, so making more profit. And the customer is not surprised by the bill. Charging for a cleanup or 2x their weekly rate is something they expect. I then throw in and you just get your first cut for free. Customers love this and have never pushed back, not even once. I hear other people saying that they're getting customers upset and angry, canceling services over it. Hey, if that works for you, cool. That's great. How you pitch that the customer is very, very important. How you handle that. Because a cleanup to one customer is very different than another cleanup to another customer. So if commanders answer the phone they make it pretty clear on every single initial mo like they hit the first mode is going to be this per minute per man. The challenging part is that they accepted a quote over the phone or a instant quote. But again, put it in your, in your bottom part there in bold, big bold, saying, hey, your first cut is X amount per minute per man. And just roll with it. I would even say that. And don't even say if it's overgrown. Just like your first cut is this great. And you know, if, okay, if you beat time, you're not even gonna have to worry about it. So.

But yeah, hey, whatever works for you. I know, I know some people, they say, hey, I'm just gonna do. The first cut is twice the. The weekly price. A lot of times you actually make more money doing that than charging a per minute per man rate if you just did that, to be honest.

But you're also going to have. Where employees roll up, typically end of May, customers properties are completely overgrown. And charging two times their weekly MO price is not going to cut it on P4P. It'll take five to eight times longer. And so you'll lose an employee over that. And I'd rather lose one or two customers than a great employee simply because I'm asking them to do a job for twice the rate when it should be like five to eight times because it's completely overgrown.

All right, everyone, I hope you have a fantastic Friday, a fantastic weekend. And you know, yesterday was insane. Insane. People were backing into their trucks. People were having to go to the police because of employees that were stealing. There was. My mom went to go to the ER and like get her appendix taken out. People rain pouring down the sod when the meteorologists telling them was going to be a great day. There's like five other things that happened yesterday. Absolutely insane inside of Augusta Nation. So everyone be safe out there. Have a fantastic spring rush. I love you all, and we'll see you on Monday. Take care.