Mike Minutes Mastermind 05/12/2022

Good morning, Augusta Nation. Hope you're doing well. Let's go ahead and jump in. I had one little thing I wanted to go over and then we had some questions. I saw come in on the form.

Oh, one second. I forgot to put this link. Give me one second. I forgot to put the link in the Facebook group for YouTube. One second here. I did want to talk though about what I believe is going to be a bit of a golden window, kind of a window opportunity to hire people. Kind of like what I talked about at conference where I said, hey, there's gonna be like six weeks to hire people because the Omnicron thing and people were getting laid off kind of temporarily there. And I said, hey, this is the time to hire YouTube link here. Boom. Save.

Oh mercy as a horrible thumbnail. So let's see here. So I've been reading a few different reports, one of which was a Amazon saying that they over hired, surprise, surprise, they overhiered in January, February. And so they're laying off literally hundreds of thousands of people out of their fulfillment centers. Same thing with a lot of other companies right now, big ones. And again, they're adjusting to their stock prices and stock market getting whacked in the past few months.

Which let me promise you one thing, they would not be hiring or laying people off if their stock price was high right now. So anyways, all of that to say I think there's going to be an opportunity to hire people again here in the next couple months. It's not going to start yet. I feel like this summer though, like June, July and August is going to be when we go into a technical recession because we've already had 1/4 of GDP decrease. If that happens again, we are in technical recession. And that is when big companies are going to start just whacking employees. And that is the opportunity I think that we can then have is that small business owners actually step in and actually get employees a little bit easier. So I feel like that's just on the horizon. I have not completely got my analysis on that together to be able to say like it's happening like I did in January, but it's going. In my opinion, that is the direction I'm leaning based upon a few different reports that came out yesterday. The highest of being Amazon. That literally is hiring, laying off like tens of thousands of people. If you look at just how many people they're laying off, it's literally enough to change an entire month of new job data in the United States. When you lay off 100,000 people that's literally the equivalent of sometimes what is the total new hires.

Inside of the country. So that, in my opinion, is what has led to such an incredibly tight market when you have companies like that over hiring because they have all the money in the world. And so now as we go into economic contraction and their stock prices are getting whacked and Amazon reports a loss on last last quarter for the first time in seven years, they're going to start just cutting employees left and right. So we're going to see unemployment go back up. That's all in the works. Once you hit a technical recession, that is what happens. So just be prepared for that. Know that is an opportunity, if you're positioned correctly, to be able to get employees. Because now there's not tech companies like that just spending gobs of money on sucking up all the talent. And they literally admitted to it yesterday. They said, hey, we just went ahead and over hired because we knew that it was going to be hard to find people. And so we are, we are now laying them all off. So I'm not a huge fan of that. I think once you hire someone, it's kind of your responsibility to make sure they stay busy and can have a good paycheck. So anyways, that's all to say. Let's jump into the questions. This is for Evansville. How do we do paid time off? I understand paid time off accumulates every paycheck, but if we do 4 tens, do we pay a base times 10 hours? I usually just have the crew trade me off, trade me their day off for a Friday to avoid this. But just curious, also one in clarification on paid. Okay, let's take that one first. So paid time off has nothing to do with four tens, five eights, nothing like that. It's simply a matter of it accrues per hour worked. Right? So if you're wanting to, wanting to give an employee two weeks per year of paid time off, it would accrue at 0.04 hours per hour worked. All right? And so this is again something that you can just set up with payroll. So if you're having command center new payroll, you just need to let them know they would need to set this up and then on every paycheck they would see how much paid time off is accruing based upon how much they're working. All right. This is a, in my opinion, a good.

Benefit. I would do this benefit prior to doing healthcare.

Because again, most entry level guys like this more than they do healthcare because they already get healthcare for free. And so this is a good one, especially for your longer tenured employees that to try to keep the, to incentivize them to stay on longer because someone will accrue very much PTO after just working for you for two weeks. Like, they don't even usually use it. It's kind of a red, red flag. If they work two weeks, like, yeah, I want to use all my PTO and take next week off. Like, that's probably a red flag. So it really does incentivize your, your guys, the guys who stay with you longer to. And that's why I like it. Also, one clarification on paid holidays, because we are not like retail and our work doesn't just stop if we close if a holiday falls on Monday, but we work Tuesday, Friday to ensure we get our full work load work done. Do we still have to pay for holiday? No, you do not. So again, it's only in your handbook. By the way, it is not the law that you have to pay people more on a holiday. That is not true. So it's just about your company policy, right? So for example, we have company, we have, I think it's five or six national holidays that basically we say, hey, look, if you work during that time, you're going to get paid time and a half. And that'd be based upon your base pay of P4P. You, you make sure you get at least that amount, but you do not. It is not a legal thing that you have to pay like time and a half on a holiday. It comes down to your employee, your employee handbook or your policy. And that's what's going to be upheld in terms of most state laws. So it's mostly taken for granted and is common that you do pay time and a half if you're working like Christmas Day or New Year's Day or Thanksgiving Day, et cetera. But, but that's why it's so important to have an employee handbook, something they sign off on, because that needs to be clarified because otherwise you're getting questions all the time from every new hire because they don't understand that. So I think we pay six, six national holidays, we pay time and a half.

But it's up to everyone else. So have you made a video talking about investing into stocks then using the money to buy property? Yeah, so maybe I should do one video just on this one of these times one day. But essentially there's something called margin. Margin is basically debt against your stocks. It's extremely risky. And that's why I Feel like, you know, if you're investing in the stock market, you basically got to be able to walk away from that money and not put the business in jeopardy because you don't want to walk away from the golden goose. The business that you is producing cash flow. Just because a stock market collapse happens and we've had seen one over the past four months, so we talked about it in January, like these high flying tech stocks that I said, look, look, these are going to keep going down dramatically. They're not producing any profit. And and so when, when that happens and you see opportunities in the market and things like that, hey, let's go buy stocks. Great. How do I then use that to buy real estate? Is a matter of you have an asset that you can then go to the bank and say look, this is stocks, these are pa. This is paper money, this is liquid. Right? Theoretically stocks are considered liquid assets because you can sell them tomorrow. And so what makes them valuable is the fact that even though they're not cash, they are considered like cash when it comes to a personal financial statement to a bank. So what you can do is go to the bank say hey Look, I have $50,000 in stock market. And they are going to consider that like you had $50,000 in cash because it's considered a, a liquid asset. If you have like a 10 year bond, you're not going to be locked up for 10 years. If you have money in a CD certificate of deposit or one or two year deposit of bank where you're getting maybe half a percent or a percent back on your money, that's not considered liquid because you can't pull it out tomorrow. So when it, when it comes to buying a house, what you can theoretically do is have let's say $50,000 in stocks and depending on your brokerage, you can get margin or debt against those stocks like you would an asset of any sort. And you can literally in some, some market, some brokerages will give you like 150% of your value of your stocks. They'll give that to you in the form of margin or debt. Here's the problem. Margin and the percent of interest that you pay on margin. Not only can you get a margin call, if you start having where you know you're getting a close to 150% and all of a sudden the stock market crashes. You could literally get a call or an email from your brokerage saying you need to sell. We're going to liquidate your stocks in three days if you don't put X amount of money into your account because they're trying to make sure you don't pass that threshold or whatever that percentage is that they're allowed allowing you to leverage that stock. And so it's very, very risky. This is not something that someone should do like leveraging stocks is. It can be absolute catastrophe. And that's what happens when a market starts to come down and then it really sharply drops is usually because people were in margin and and all of a sudden they're getting margin calls. They're getting people literally calling them saying, look, if you do not sell today or put money in your account, we will liquidate your account. And that's horrible because you're literally being forced to sell at the bottom of the market. And so margin is very, very risky. But you can use margin as a way to then pay the down payment on a property. For example, that $50,000, maybe you take $50,000 in stocks and they're like, hey, we'll give you $30,000 in margin. You can literally take that money at $30,000 in, in margin from your account and don't put a down payment on property. Again, you're very much risk because if you, the market crashes, you could then be on the hook to have to pay off that brokerage account or.

Sell your and liquidate your account. So very, very risky. But it can be done. And I've used it. When I know that there was I had no margin in my account, I say, okay, I'm going to use a short term amount of money to be able to pay the down payment and I'll be able to refinance the property and use that to pay off my margin. So basically there's no money in the deal from me personally. But again, that is a game that is risky because if during that period of time when you're swinging, when you're going from down payment using margin to okay, I will refinance it once I fix it up and improve the value of the property and then pay off my margin. If the market collapses during that time and you're at 50, 60, 80% margin, very, very risky. So I don't like to go above 15% margin, 20% if I see like in a big, big dip, maybe I'll go to 20% margin. But anything above that in my opinion is very, very, very risky. And that's why most retail traders and retail investors get wiped out. Kevin from South Haven, are the mapping service areas being used yet? Yeah, you're referring to Google, Google Earth Pro. I keep getting a fair amount of estimates out of my service area. But I will say it does seem to be getting better. Yep. So if you did not get an email from Jaden and make sure. Because what we did is Jaden went to every single person's account and basically looked at the what what you had in your wiki, what you had in your dispatch board, and tried to align and get your service area based upon what's in your fdd, et cetera, franchises, your franchise agreement. So that was what kind of determined that. Now if that changes or if you want to make a change, we can only update that once a month because we literally have to have everyone reset their entire computer redownload a file from Google Earth Pro. So if you want to make changes, totally fine estimate. Gustalawncare Services.com is where those changes can be made. But as of Monday of this week, everyone has it. And so it should be like you said, improving. But if you still constantly are getting ones out, I would definitely reach out to estimategustalongarservices.com and if you haven't already asked them, say, hey, could I get a picture of what it's saying my service area is? Because I keep getting ones outside. And it'll give you a picture, they'll send you a screenshot of what we got.

And then you'll be able to say, okay, well actually I don't serve that area, I've moved that in or whatever it might be. And you'll see on a map, hey, there's my franchise territory. Here's my service area, whatever it might be. So feel free to email. Estimate augustalonkerservices.com I know they're finalizing a few things the next few days, but next week definitely they could reach out and they, if you want things moved in or anything like that, by all means let them know. So that was. I know I remember, Kevin, prior to last week when I was doing some training inside your account, I remember specifically there being a few question marks I had on some of the peripheral areas, areas of your account. Because on the map that we had prior before we had the map of Google Earth inside service, I'll put the one where we took a screenshot of like all your current customers. There were a few that were kind of further out and that creates that gray area. Right. And that's why the Google Earth should be much better because there's a defined like this is the line period. So definitely, if you're still getting them as of this week, definitely reach out to estimate GustAlongerServices.com be like, hey, can I just get a screenshot of what is currently in the map? And they just know that we only are able to update that once a month. Otherwise, it'd just be constant confusion, because every computer has to be across. The entire system has to be updated with a new file. It's not like it's over the web. It's not a cloud software. We actually download an app. So, unfortunately, that's the case. I think that is all I have for today. There's any questions, I'll stick on here for a few seconds. If there's any live, though, feel free to ask.

Cool. All right, well, I appreciate all of you. If you have any questions, feel free to fill out the form and we'll see you tomorrow. Take care.