Mike Minutes Mastermind 05/17/2023

Hello, Augusta Nation. Hope you're doing super well. It's going to get things kicked off if you have not noticed it already. There is a conference tab on the dashboard has the schedule. We've officially rented the cathedral which will be very interesting. It'll either be a huge win or a massive loss, but fortunately it's only half the dance. The only place I could find that is downtown there that we can actually rent. So I think it'll be cool. I think it'll be fun. The media team is pretty psyched about the picture quality. It's going to be coming through on a through stained glass windows. So anyways, that's all on there in terms of scheduling as well as a form to fill out. Don't feel like you have fill out the form now. I have a rough idea of how many people from Augusta Nation will be there, but we do need to know before the event so that way we can plan for food because that food, the dinner that we're doing for a gustination only on the Tuesday night is almost $100 a plate. So please, if you sign up, make sure you come. Okay, let's see here.

Okay, let's jump into questions. Present. Oh no, that I was like what am I missing? I got places in the face Facebook. One second, right.

And it lays out on there in terms of like how many tickets are included and what you need to do if you only bring like 3 people Etc. So.

Copy. I already did that. Thank you. All right, drop this in here. Facebook.

Whoa. Okay, let's see here. There we go. All right, let's jump in.

Share screen. If you all would like. You're more than welcome as always to join the P4P as well as the copilot Facebook groups and copilot ones. You'll see updates and things like that.

Recommend doing that. Yesterday we rolled out a update to the dispatch board and it's looking pretty good now with the map, the list view below it, ability to float the map. We're going to be changing it to where you can change the colors based upon service type, a service type, your service, your visit type, or by employee color. So it's going to be fun. Starting to look pretty good. So yeah, take, take a look at that if you like. Kyle tarvin we have 36 recurring monthly flower bed maintenance.

Jobs we do each month. Currently we have them set up to be completed the first weeks of the month. However, this is causing a bunch of issues like having to work overtime and crazy hours the first two weeks, then going back to Normal the last two weeks, the month. How would you go about scheduling these to where they are more spread out? I was thinking of doing one to one or two days a month for them, one or two a day for the month. But some of these jobs are a little bit of a drive for us to get to like 20, 30 minutes drive away one way, maybe let go of the six or seven that are further away or just jack up the rate, then spread the rest out.

It really depends. I think the way you've done it is actually somewhat better. That is having all the recurring monthly like weeding. Being separate from your mowing is sometimes good because when someone has, you know, 15 lawns in their route and two of them need weeding, a lot of the times they'll make yellow slips on the, on the two weeding jobs. So I am a fan, kind of honestly of having all your weeding bunched up together. Like what I would potentially do if I was you is maybe you do a route every Friday or every Thursday, for example, and you just bunch together the recurring weeding and just do them all. You just know there's one person doing it each. Each week. There's one day worth of weeding for one person kind of thing. And they just, all they do that day is weeding. It's so much better because they get in the rhythm of weeding. Instead of like having start and stop with their mowing. Someone that's doing like a 60 inch zero turn have having to get out a rake on their knees and start pulling weeds. They a lot of times will make mistakes on weeding. It just is what it is. Yes, you need to have yellow slip system. Yes. But like you also can just like fix the root of the problem which is the fact that they're having to switch tasks like that. And so if you've already kind of done that, I would just recommend just making it like one day a week for one person to do those. And then in terms of like pricing. Yeah. Like if, if you're already kind of overworking, I would go ahead and do six or seven. Definitely raise their price dramatically. And.

20, 30 minute drive one way mercy. If they're that far away, I might drop them or yeah, just orders, jack the rate and then they'll, they'll leave organically. But if you've already done it, and that is separate your mowing from weeding, I'd probably try sticking with that. We're thinking about in Bellingham trying to eventually go to that too. And that is like having routes eventually Dedicated just for weeding and dedicated just for initial mows. Just because it's such a different not such a different. Like I know theoretically it's very similar, but that's where your most of your yellow slips are initial mows and weeding jobs. So it's not a bad idea to have someone dedicated just to that. Nick from Marysville could we get into trouble for having people add their birthday when applying on our website I believe we are not supposed to ask them for their age prior to a job offer.

No, I don't think it's bad to ask for their age. It's more a matter of if you hire or fire based upon their age. But most job applications let me see here, I can look into it. I think some states might have this as an issue.

But.

I haven't heard anyone get in trouble for this because there's a lot of job applications like if you want d you as an applicant you put your name into their you put your age in there. So I'll take a look at it. But I think for the vast majority of it's a valuable data point because if you get someone that's 16 or 17, you kind of know what you're getting into. They're 18 or 19, you kind of know what you're getting into. If they're 55, you know what you're getting into. And it gives a lot of context to their their resume if they submit one. So I like the data point. Just can't hire or fire based upon it legally. So I'll take a look at it though. Russell from Canton we had a client drop us and wanted to send us the invoice for the moe's we did this month. We had his card on file so I charged it and sent him the paid invoice. Now he wants to dispute a $20 bed maintenance charge. I'd rather give him the $20 back even though he performed the service because it's just not worth fighting it over. I have not given a refund yet and can't find anything on dashboard on how to how do I refund him $20. Thanks Mike. This would depend if you are in stripe you would go into stripe, you'd probably see the.

The chargeback and you can just not just you can just agree to it in.

Clearance. Same thing. You basically need to go into your processor wherever that that chargeback is coming from. Whether you're in duper and you're using stripe or in service on PI and you're using clear it, you need to Go into your processor and then just approve it. Um, this happens occasionally to me too on the media side and you just go into stripe. I just approve them and it's just not worth the headache honestly. Unless it's like hundreds of dollars but for like 50 bucks. It's funny, people will buy on long term media. They'll buy the like the, the door hanger designs and they're. They'll do a chargeback and the reason will be like I expected to have a couple thousand door hangers sent to me like printed and sent to me. It's like dude, it's pretty obvious. It says this is a Photoshop file and a PNG file. Not printed stuff. Anyways, anyways. Yeah, so I agree. I give it to 50 bucks, 20 bucks, whatever. Just it's more of a hassle honestly. And you'll have to submit paperwork and. And they're usually fi. They usually.

Go in the way of the customer anyways. Chargebacks. Connor from Evansville have you ever thought about speaking with someone to do telehealth? Is that cheaper for health insurance than actual major medical? I saw the McDonald's is offering telehealth in our area and thought it was a cool option for health benefit. I haven't looked at it as a separate benefit. That is a good idea. There's two things. One, this would be something that you would probably offer, you would pay for and in. You just have to be careful. You can't really say you have health benefits like technic health insurance benefits or anything like that. However like if you get most, most health insurance plans come with telemedicine. So like I know the health plan that we got for local shop in here command is.

They get free telemedicine. So like they can call anytime and get a doctor or a nurse at least I think and then the doctor if they need it.

So it's usually included in most health insurance plans. Yeah, I bet there's probably a plant that thing out there for like 10 or 20 bucks a month where you need just telehealth. Not a bad idea. Never done it, but I think it's a great idea.

Connor from Evansville, I have a local 5th 3rd bank who wants to partner with us and their trust department he would be dealing with. We would be dealing with foreclosures and they can't find someone willing to do the work. And when they referred us to us from the grounds guys here locally, they were referred to us from the ground guys here locally. Some of their properties outside of our service area maybe 15 to 20 minutes from what I know they don't care what they have to pay. They just can't find someone to deal with properties like this. I'm sure on the odd job it's not as big a deal, but I'm not sure about going about doing it for the maintenance aspect. Will we just do all their properties on one day and have to charge more because of the drive time? How would you suggest this? They. They said with foreclosures on the rise they have. They could have a slew of properties for us to take care of. Again, having a hard time because someone with a team to do the work.

We are on the very west side of our service here and 90 of what we are service is on the east. Some some of their properties are only 15 minutes away from the shop but it goes west away from most of our properties. Thoughts on this? In general, I'm not a huge fan of doing foreclosures. If you're dealing directly with the bank, that might be a slightly different. If you're usually these are like through second and third and fourth parties where you're like sending a bunch of pictures and all that sort of thing. If they're not going to make you do a ton of pictures and like submit pictures on every single visit, if they aren't going to.

Have certain demands where they can like take away your payment and it's like more of an invoiceable like it follows the system which is we put your addresses on, we have a price per cut and we send you an invoice and you get it paid, then I would potentially think about it. Right. And if you're dealing directly with the bank, if you say look, if it's an overgrown mode, this is what we're charging per minute per man. If it's a regular visit, we will give you an exact price and if you don't care about the price, that's fine. But that's how we will bill you. I would just make sure you're charging significantly more. These usually don't end well. Honestly, we don't work with foreclosures. When I first got started, it was a great way to do winter work. Actually is like property cleanups and like winterizations of houses that are foreclosed. Great. It was a lot of pictures. You always have to submit to a portal. They could refuse it because you missed one picture of a one little thing that was a pain in the butt. It doesn't scale. Your employees are not going to be able to do it. Very efficiently. However, if they're just doing like, hey, we have a bunch of foreclosures. We will give you a list of properties and you can charge us whatever you want and you can invoice us every month and follow the same system. I'm fine with that if I'm dealing directly with the bank. If you're dealing with a third party, they will sell you on the whole, like, foreclosure thing. And, like, it's so easy. And like, you don't have to just like a couple pictures per time and then you get into the system of it and then they ramp up how many pictures and evidence and a bunch of garbage.

Del Thomas, is there a template letter or email for doing a price increase on the dashboard bell? There should be one in your email templates already. And then there is an actual letter. Yes, on the dashboard, I believe, for download, like, if you want to, like, print them off. But yeah, there is an email template. And feel free to, if you knew the coach, go over exactly what that looks like in terms of changes, if any additional changes you might want to make or modifications to it just for your specific scenario or situation. It is in there, though. If it's not, let us know.

All right, cool. All right, guys, have a great Wednesday. We'll see.