Mike Minutes Mastermind 05/13/2024

Hello Guess the nation. Let's go and get started.

Right quick thing on this upcoming week, let me present this.

All right, so if you haven't already underneath Academy, go to Christmas Lights. You can see all the information around the Christmas light side of things. This Thursday, May 16th there is a webinar introduction. Scott Young is the founder of Certified Lights. Let me going over the Certified Partner Certified Lights partnership. What are the benefits? Going over the benefits of adding Christmas light installation, you know, run over the numbers etc, the type of profit margins you'd expect and kind of what that looks like. So kind of a general overview of the program and the discounts as well as how you can make more money using Christmas lights. So highly recommend it. Just click here. It'll take you to a registration page which is going to look like this. Go ahead and register and you're rocking and rolling.

All right. And then these are the monthly ones that will come down down the pipe. But this is the one starting this Thursday. Highly recommend if you have not already registered to get that rule in.

All right, let's go ahead and start with questions. First one is from Joel from Lafayette On Friday you talked about the success metric or sticking point for Augusta franchisee be successful and the last and last long term getting past 500 000. Alex Ramosi has talked about this kind of metric for gym launch of a gym owner making X amount of dollars in the first month. Do you have such a metric for field technician retention? If not, what top three metrics or checkpoints do you think should be the focus on helping a field tech approve achieve to improve the chance of them sticking around for the long term? Great question. I'd say the point of activation for a team member is when when they make a certain amount on pay for performance. So like $200. I'd probably put that as like a pretty decent benchmark. If they make above $200 on P4P bonus, the faster you can get them to do that, I would imagine that their retention would be better. I haven't actually tracked this number, but I can almost guarantee that this is the case if someone can get into the system and within a matter of a couple paychecks be making over $200 a paycheck on P4P. Their attention at that point I would imagine is far greater because they actually have some motivation because they're working quickly and now you actually have some sort of downside of yellow slips and callbacks and damage cases based upon the fact that you have performance dollars to take from. So that'd be like the number one. Other points of activation would probably.

That you can actually control would probably be having a one on one with them after they're onboarding and getting started. I recommend having an one on one within their first month for sure. If you do that and they make above base pay significantly like their second paycheck, you're probably going to retain that person a lot longer. So how can you get them to quickly get above base pay, tight route.

Systematized and simple services to where they don't have to learn for three or four months before they become efficient, pricing is correct so they can actually win the game, etc.

Kyle Tarvin I have not been paying much attention to Christmas light webinar stuff coming up as we have been doing lights for quite a while already. However, is there special price move people get on the webinars? I thought we already had a discount the lights, but was wondering if there's an additional count for those attending. No, there's not an additional discount. If you've already done lights, you probably are good to go. Just use the augusta lights light supply.com to get access and enroll and you can do that from here. Just go to the lighting supply store here.

But if you haven't done lights before, you probably want to be this introduction webinar and these monthly ones that they've set up for us as well and highly recommend. I think even if you have done lights in the past, probably not a bad idea just to be on there, figure out what resources and training you can get as part of the program, etc.

This is from Mr. Anonymous. I was doing Christmas lights before this new announcement from the franchise and had plans to do as a separate business entirely. Will this pose a conflict with the franchise? No, you can totally do it. If you have like a different brand or something, that's totally fine. I would venture to believe that pretty quickly you'll see what we're going to do online. We'll kind of like trounce any other SEO because what we're going to do like our goal is actually still have. If you're offering Christmas lights, we're going to put on augustalongersurpets.com and we'll have it there. And then with christmaslights.com our goal is like I think we can crush on it because there's no one else that does like the national side for residential and like it's way less populated than lawn care and landscaping in terms of SEO because most of the companies that do SEO are agencies in the Christmas light world. And so they're doing like more or less landing pages. They don't do great optimization and so they're more or less using it as a way to do landing pages for ads because they charge on a per lead basis. So they just need a good landing page. There's a difference between a good landing page and a good SEO driven website. And so we think we can crush this. Our goal is like Augusta lights shows up but then right after that is augustalongersurfaces.com yourterritory name christmaslights. So we think we can get number one and number two in most of our markets. And so it's not going to pose a conflict or anything like that. I really don't care if you have a different brand. Totally fine. I think over the course of time you'd probably see okay now it's just better just to merge all underneath Augusta. That way you can easily cross sell too because it's a little difficult to have like you know bills Christmas lights and then Augusta lawn care and like cross sell that versus like hey this is Augusta Christmas Christmas lights and this is Augusta lawn care and we cross pollinate. It makes a lot more sense like if you try to upsell your customers all in your database of lawn care like inside copilot to Christmas lights makes a lot of sense if it says it's from Augusta already versus like feeling like it's almost like a cross company deal. So but there's no, no issue with that if you have that. All right. Dustin from Bloomington. In Bloomington we are in profit mode. We have increased price as we talked about last week and only lost seven customers. We went from 105 budget hours recurring to 121 over the weekend. We need to let a team member go for a multitude of reasons and we have one that is on the rocks. Total current team Kyle and three employees. One is rough hiring ads have been put up. I believe Kyle has like 16 interviews scheduled for tomorrow. My question we are still getting a ton of estimates coming in and are still getting accepted even after padding hours. E fees and material. We do not have the guys to get the work done and the existing crew is working overtime to get all the work finished at point. Do you turn off the leads? Definitely do not want to do this. What are your recommendations? I'm happy to be in this spot but it's extremely stressful on the Kyle on the team. Kyle and I budget on a schedule this week 179 due to push back projects next week is 150 budget hours. Mercy, you really need five people. You have four right now, but one of them is a GM. So.

If you have 16 interviews scheduled for tomorrow, I would put some sort of incentive around someone starting right away. Assuming this is all like a lot of basic mowing and basic projects, you should be someone to start pretty quickly.

In terms of the leads if you really have to. Maybe you just don't do in person estimates right now so Kyle can stay out in the field and just do OTP and instant quotes. And then I would up those prices pretty dramatically too. Like you don't want to be taking any new work on right now unless it is extremely profitable. So I would probably increase your instant quote prices. I would probably potentially stop doing in person estimates because like if you're that far overbooked and I'm assuming if like you're at 150 budget hours for the next like three to four weeks, there's really no point in doing in person estimates because someone's going to be booked out six weeks anyways to get on the schedule and you're taking time away from Kyle to actually do the work and get the jobs done. So I would probably recommend worst case scenario, turn off your in person estimates, up your, up your instant prices on your website and do OTP only and increase your price matrix on mowing.

That's like worst case scenario. Best case scenario is tomorrow. You get like two or three killers at these interviews. And you can take people who have already have experience. If you have 16, let's say eight of them show up, let's hope two or three of them are good and you get them started right away. And then basically I would probably still do what I just said in terms of at least temporarily stopping in person estimates. Because if you get that many new team members, Kyle's gonna have his hands full just managing new team members and training them up. And that should be his preoccupation and not doing the estimates in person estimates because just doing even three, two or three in person estimates for a GM in a day, like can ruin their whole afternoon. Like not ruin it, but like it's just a matter of it takes all their time. So if you hire two or three new people tomorrow, you could handle this workflow and that of jobs on the schedule. But it's going to mean Kyle needs to manage these people because half of his crew is going to be brand new. And so I would recommend still probably turning off in person estimates. And again, you can do that from your Dashboard, it's going to take a couple of days for that to effect anyways and then by the time you get to these new people onboarded and like rolling. So this is a good problem to be in when you're in profit mode. This is the problems that you face when you're in profit mode. It's better than being ghost mode and trying to like burn money on getting new leads. So good problem to have. I would make sure any new incoming work is extremely profitable by increasing your price matrices and your instant quotes for sure, which I'm sure you've probably already done those things. Dustin, good problem to have. As when you raise prices and everyone stays, we have a good, good problem. Dustin says, what would be a bonus recommendation?

I would say something like a few hundred dollars if they're willing to start tomorrow and they have the skills and the ability to do so. What this is going to do is if they don't have a job right now, it means that they're going to want to jump on this and not wait till the next Monday. Like for some reason everyone thinks they gotta start at the beginning of a week. It's like, look, you start tomorrow, I'll give you 300 if you just work the rest of this week.

And I'll get you in payroll and everything so that by the time next payroll runs around, you'll be in QuickBooks and you'll be rolling everything. But I'll give you cash, 300 bucks end of this week. Just if you work this whole week and you could say something like, you don't have yellow slip, you don't have a call back this whole week. If you come on team, I'll give you 300 bucks at the end because that $300 you're making up for in a matter of a few jobs that you would otherwise have to push off due to not having that employee. So, okay, I would, I would say this, Dustin, I'd say, okay, I'll give you $300 at the end of this week. You have started work, I will get you on board in terms of, in the payroll system and all the rest of it, but I'll give you 300 bucks end this week. If you have no callbacks and you jump on the team, you get rolling, assuming this person is already trained up and they can jump in and hit the ground running. We also have a 50 close ratio, but the projects are not massive, but are like 1200 to 600 rock or mulch jobs. Yeah. So I would probably.

It sounds like you're Going to get labors, right? Like that's not a problem. So this is what I would probably do to apology Dustin. Instead of pausing in person estimates, I would probably just tell commands like, hey, no in person estimates this week. So, like, probably next Monday or Tuesday, you're gonna get stacked with a bunch of in person estimates. If these are the type of jobs and you like them, they're doing, they're crushing, et cetera, then what that means though is this week you must get labors because next week you'll not have the time to actually manage them in terms of training them up, getting them on board, et cetera. So, like, this is a very much of a short term measure and it's very much of a risky measure if you don't get employees. But what you can do is be like, hey, no more in person estimates this week. They all need to be scheduled next week. You might lose one or two of these jobs. Your close ratio might be like 40% simply due to the fact that now people are gonna wait for you to even show up and do an in person estimate. But it gives you the time this week to focus on two to three new hires, get them really dialed in this week with a bonus at the end of the week, knowing that next week, like probably Monday and Tuesday are gonna be stacked with estimates of in person stuff. That's probably what I would do. But you run the risk of not getting new team members. So what I would probably do is hire three people knowing that one of them isn't going to work out, so that by next week you have two solid team members rocking and rolling, and you can handle the inflow and that then they're also capable of doing the jobs without a massive amount of supervision and training. That is a risky move I just I described there, Dustin. But if you're wanting to maximize your capacity, that's what you do. It is high, high risk though. And so again, you raise prices on 100 budget hours. If you raise prices by 15, it means that you probably are going to make an extra five to six thousand dollars a month in profit. Fantastic. You won't see that money for a month.

But it's going to be coming. And so you definitely have some latitude here to hire over, hire a little bit, and then know that someone will get capped and then just realize that in two months this comes down hard. So being able to still stack up the budget hours right now, especially the recurring stuff, is really important so that when you do hire up, you can keep them busy throughout the once things get really hot.

So you know the drill. All right, thank you, everyone. Hope you have a fantastic Monday, and we'll see you all tomorrow. Take care.