Mike Minutes Mastermind 05/15/2024

And we're live. Hello, everyone. Hope you're having a fantastic Wednesday.

Let's get this party started.

Boom.

Quick announcement. Tomorrow's evening is the kickoff event with certified lights for the Christmas Lights webinar. It's an hour long. If you go to the Christmas Lights page on the dashboard, it'll be there. I'm going to send an email out tomorrow morning as a reminder. We will have a ma. We will not have a mastermind tomorrow just to facilitate your time being spent towards the webinar for the Christmas lights. So looking forward to that.

Let's go ahead and jump right into questions.

What do we got? We got five.

Corey, Cory, I think you meant to text this to me personally. Good afternoon, Mike. Will you be in town tomorrow morning? Thanks in advance. Yes, I'll be there at the meeting. All right.

First question is from Bryson. Mike called me the underaged at training.

I could probably ask other owners this, but I want to ask you because you're probably the busiest. What is your process like to ensure that you have time for spending time, in God's word, at least a few times a week? Obviously, everyone is going at 100 miles per hour right now, and I'm finding it very difficult. I also have a problem where I need it to be the same step in my day every time I do it or I forget or brush it off to do something else. An example, I need it to be after I eat before I work every day. This is a huge thing to me and it's very hard with things running long in a day and getting back up early to start the next. Ryan, it's 8:00pm Unloading of the storage unit and it's day after the same. Cool.

So I can't really speak on terms of what you should do in this case, because this I can only speak on my own.

What I do. So. One second here. Let me make sure my microphone's working. Give me one second.

Microphone. Yes, it is. Okay, cool. So I'm not going to speak in terms of what you should or should not do here. This is more a matter of just personal preference. Let me just preface it that way. So a couple things.

First off, personally, I'm not hard on myself in this area. I know that there will be times there might be a day or two where I can't simply because I literally have worked 18 hours. However, I also believe in priorities. And one very profound but not so profound thing Alex recently said on a podcast was priorities come prior. Duh. That's what priorities mean. So to me, it doesn't matter what is priority and then it doesn't really matter what my time schedule looks like. If it's priority, it means it comes first. So, so there are things in my day that like are a priority. Like I am going to work out regardless of how busy I am, whether it be prayer, devotions, et cetera. Like those things are priority. So like my day doesn't start until those things are done. And so when you think of it like that, it's like it's not like I have a 24 hour day, I have a 23 hour day because I need to get these things done right. And so then you just start allocating differently. And then again, assuming these things are priority, if they're not priority, they don't come prior. Therefore you will get everything else done and then you will fit them in around everything else.

But also there are times when I might only have 10 to 20 minutes for this versus other times of the year where I can spend 30 or 40 minutes. I'm not going to beat myself up over this. And.

If you look again like I'm speaking to the person that cares about what, what Bryson's talking about here.

If you look in the Bible, for example, there are periods of time where people, they had to go to war and they weren't necessarily actively praying, they weren't actively, to use your word, spending time in God's word. They were doing what they were prepared for the entire time. Like in a time of peace you prepare for war. So my big thing is like in a time of peace, I'm going to do this more often. There are times of war when I need to get things done and I will have less time to do this. The question is, what do you do during times of peace, during the winter when you have plenty of time? Is this something you prioritize? Is it something you actually do spend and spend more time on because you have the time? Or do you fill it with a bunch of random other garbage like scrolling shorts or TikToks and mindlessly scrolling on social media so that just be my 2 cents? It's not necessarily correct. That's what has worked for me. I do not beat myself. I used to beat myself for this a lot and now I do not. I realize that there are times of peace and there are times of war and during times of peace I will prepare for war. And how I prepare for war is I do exactly what you talked about and I'm going to spend more time on these. These elements also caveat, priorities are done first my day and I don't look at myself as having a 24 hour day. I look at myself as having a 20, 22 and a half hour day because I need to work out, I need to pray and I need to have devotions out. After that I will fill my day up. And so that's just how I approach it. Derek from Derek Duran from Allen Park, Michigan. Follow up, follow up from yesterday's question, I understand we have a project service area outside of our five mile radius territory. I'm wondering is how will we handle neighboring Augusta territories going after the same lights customers? I've got customers 25 plus miles away. If a franchisee were to start in Ann Arbor to the west of me, we'd likely be competing on lights leads. If not competing, I'd be in their territory. Not an issue now. But this was the question of scaling this service. I was wondering about the locations across the country. This is why I was leaning towards doing the lights under a new business before announcement was made.

Yes, like the given area that you've currently serviced is because you have been servicing outside of Augusta. Once Augusta kicks in and we do our SEO, like we're only going to be targeting your service area. So I think that most people, not the vast majority of people, overestimate how far they need to serve in order to be able to build build a big business. And so if you've been traveling 25 miles, I believe that you could travel 10 and focus more SEO and marketing on the 10 mile radius and still make the business work.

Now in the past if you, we've never really targeted it this way. And so if you've got way more spread out and let's say someone from Ann Arbor did join and you're like, then it'd be a conversation with them. Perhaps they don't want to do lights. Perhaps if they do, it's like hey, I'll give you the ones in Ann Arbor, you give me the ones over on my side and let's do a bit of a trade. Also your leads are locked in like existing customers. If someone did join Ann Arbor, you'd still keep your Christmas light customers. It just be that you couldn't market for new ones in that area. But any hundred thousand client, 100,000 person radius, everyone has a hundred thousand people inside their market. There's a few that don't, but they have even a larger radius because they're super rural. In 100,000 people you can, you can definitely get 150 people that do lights 150 people is 100 plus thousand dollars in lights revenue. And I think that's possible. And so based on the stuff that I've been looking at, it's going to take. It's going to be different though than in the past when you did a massive service area and just hope that you got some leads from it. Now it's like we're going to go more targeted. Our websites will be zeroed in on your service area and.

Until we have that problem, it's a bit of a boogeyman because in the past you've, you've marketed to the 25 mile radius. So. But we will approach it and treat it the exact same way as we would with territories, etc.

So as I would with all leads, it's like focus on your territory and only go outside your service area for one time jobs. So that way you know all recurring revenue is locked inside of your territory forever. And you can always keep marketing in that area and then areas outside of that like lights, if you had customers and someone else got a territory, you'd still keep the lead. Like you still keep the customer. You just don't get any more leads in that area. So. Garrett from Glendale. Question one, question two and question three. Question one. We are considering offering snow removal as our winter services instead of doing bush trimming, leaf cleanup, pulling weeds, etc. As winter services. Last year even with the opt out, we had about 20% of clients cancel in September, October before winter services start in November. Then we had another 60% cancel winter services by January. My theory is that we have a higher drop off of winter services compared to other locations because we have a harsher winter that is about six months long. I believe if we auto opted everyone into snow service at the same monthly charge as mowing, we would only lose 50th percent of customers and would be providing a service they actually want. Go for it. If you believe that that's. I agree with that premise. Actually based in Colorado, I think you could probably pull this off. You have to change your verbiage a little bit on your estimates. I think that could potentially work. So yeah, I would support that 100%. Again like five tracks, one's winter services, another one snow. This would probably be what you. If in a snow environment this is probably what I would do. Like if we got, if we got like five to 10 snow events a year in a my market that's probably what we'd be doing. But we only got one, maybe two. So it just. We went to services have done has been more consistent than snow. Question 2 I'm attending the light Christmas Light webinar and we did about 15k in Christmas lights last year. We did about 75k in snow last year. It feels crazy to focus on selling Christmas lights in the spring rush of snow season similar to selling landscape projects during the spring rush when we need to focus on recurring do you think it should make it make sense to do two winter tracks, snow and lights or just focus on one winter track? It really comes down to the fact that if you think you can fill it with snow, just do one. If you think you can fill your schedule and stay on the offensive during the winter, there's no reason to add more services. The off season should be filled with one track unless you need two to fill it. So for example, you could have like most I think a lot of locations will probably adopt the strategy of winter services plus Christmas lights. Great, because winter services by and of itself might only make up 20 to 40% of your regular revenue and you need the other Christmas light track in order to be able to go from 40 to say 80% of revenue.

So it's totally fine to match mission match mix and match. Question 3 Is there any way to get snow removal website and GMB started to further optimize for the snow track similar to Christmas lights? No. No. We're not going to create a whole nother brand around snow. If you want to, there's a couple brand, a couple of locations that will change their business name during the winter like Augusta Lawn Care and Snow Removal. Totally fine. There's been a couple people have made landing pages and then they send it to me for approval and I just make sure from a trademark perspective they're in the right and then they'll be fine there too. But we aren't going to make new brands. This is like the Christmas light thing is going to cost us gobs of money and we can't do that. Like we just can't. We can't do it for every service because then it's like well do we do Augusta mulching? Do we Augusta spray spraying and weed removal? Like so we can't. The reason we are doing this is to complement the fact that lawn care will encompass all those other services pretty easily. The Christmas Light is a very differently branded product and it's extremely important for the off season. But if we start doing like every other Augusta whatever, we start diluting the brand. So Augusta Lawn Care can very easily go into snow like most companies are. They're very used to that. And you can put the banner on the top of your website that says like snow removing, accepting snow removal clients. You have the snow page, we have a service page for that, etc. So yeah, Ken Lynn what kind of volume can max AI handle? How many calls at once? Etc.

You'd be hard pressed to overload it because it's all running on AWS servers. Probably it would t It would probably send us warnings if like more than 500 people call in a minute because then they'd be probably some sort of issue or problem. But nax AI could. It's like it's a server so like it can run on anything. It's like.

Yeah, it doesn't like slow down or anything like that. Kenlyn, I watched the webinar. I was wondering what are the requirements for the thousand dollars to get franchises together? Is there a type of training? Do we have a speaker? Is there a time frame? Etc. Great question. On the dashboard, if you go to.

You're talking about the stipend for getting people together. So if you go to the dashboard, you go under.

Forms and then you go to meet up stipend application. It goes over all the information right here. So basically, if you're getting people together, you're doing some training. A thousand dollars should cover like the cost of a room, some food. I'm happy to pay for it.

Very cool. All right, I think that's all we got for today. I'm looking forward to tomorrow's webinar. There will not be a mastermind tomorrow. The Christmas lights webinar will be in the evening. I don't want to overload everyone. I know everyone's very busy. That's all we got. Thanks guys. We'll see you tomorrow.