Mike Minutes Mastermind 05/17/2024

Good morning destination. Hope you're doing good. Let's get started. I'm gonna go right into questions.

You probably you will have not really seen the text yet because I haven't even sent it yet. Sorry about that. Let me just quickly send this out.

Actually I'll just send it out afterwards and it'll be recording.

All right. Present Share screen Last night was the Christmas Lights webinar. As soon as they give me the recording I will get that sent over. Fortunately I wasn't able to record it but they were. So I will send that over and I will put it on the dashboard for viewing as well.

All right, first question is from Mr. Anonymous. I know this is not ideal, but would it be a bad idea for a location to switch to profit mode for the rest of the year if the GM is struggling and just wants to simplify things instead of pushing growth so hard. We may be doing this for one of our locations soon but wanted your blessing before we do anything. This particular location is doing roughly 18k per month, but I think we get it to 28k ish by raising prices. They're not at capacity yet yet but they are struggling to pick up work. Currently we have, we are having to spend quite a bit to acquire new customers. I think we could get the location to at least 20 to 22,000 in revenue with 1 to 1 to 1.5 employees and the GM I know we could. We would need to raise prices pretty hard since at least five to seven dollars per on most customers. But I don't know if this would be enough to get the location into profitability. I'm game to continue pushing the education if needed. But I'm thinking about the mentality, the mental integrity of the GM and don't want to burn out situation happening. Yeah. So I would have an honest conversation with them and make sure that this is something that if by doing this you win point with them honestly like hey let's for this year just take it easy now if they're doing 18,000 per month now let's just assume that like they've been pushing spending a lot of ads to get that. Let's assume it's 15,000.

If you raise prices by 5 to $7 per cut you will get it to 20 and at 20 you can be profitable and usually is like the most profitable location. I've seen that profit around 20 and we have several owners that do this. They just have one employee and themselves and they optimize for profitability at that size it's very possible.

To be profitable. And, and so.

What happens? The reason you, the real reason you switch to profitability is not your price increase. It'll be the fact that you switch your GM from spending half their day doing marketing and advertising and sales and doing a bunch of estimates into producing work. So I just have an honest conversation with them like, hey, why don't we do this for the rest of the year and then we'll switch into growth mode again next year. But here are the expectations I want you to be able to make profit sharing, here's why I'm doing it, et cetera. And do this as a way to really kind of gain credibility with them because you're, you're doing it for them.

Really. And so, yeah, Coach Connor, we're doing about 80% recurring. Well, which means cash flow is a little bit tight since we do not have projects to bill out as often and having to build up the bank account a little slower this time of year. So we send invoices and bill for completed for project within 24 to 48 hours of doing the job. Since we are doing more mowing, do you think this would be an issue with the billing for the initial MoW upon completion? We already create initial mode as a separate service because the crew asked to be informed. And it's easy for customers to understand why one charges higher than the other and makes verbiage match, etc. Basically, what would the cons be of doing this? Would the will more cancel because of the high initial. Do I need to change verbiage on welcome and thank you, etc.

Since we're, we are doing more mowing, do you think there'd be an issue with the billing for the initial MoW upon completion?

No.

I think that's fine. I don't see a problem here. We always invoice for projects, you know, within 24 hours.

Since we are doing more mowing, do you think there would be an issue with the billing for the initial MoW upon completion?

No. Oh, I see what you're saying. You're saying for the initial mo, you want to charge them right off the get. I see what you're saying.

I don't think there'd be any more cancellation there versus if they get their first month bill and they have two other mowings and the initial mo. Mostly because if you're telling them right away, they actually would feel like you're not hiding something from them. A lot of times the reason people cancel after their first month is they don't remember about that initial Mower verbiage and they're like, why is that one so much more expensive? And now that problem's gone, like that was a month ago in their mind. Right. So yeah, I would, I would think it's totally fine for your initial mows if you wanted to collect on those right away because those can be this time of year, a lot like a big chunk of revenue. I've seen some locations, 15 to 20% of their revenue is initial mows. If they're concentrating mostly on mowing and so look at those as projects, that'd be fine. It'd also be a way to make sure you get your credit card on file and actually are able to charge them before the next two or three visits. That potentially if they're not, if they're trying to not pay you, you don't even get those done making sure you actually get payment for it.

Kyle Tarvin, when raising prices, is it better to just do a blanket price increase for all customers regardless if they are priced or not? Out of 130 customers at our normal location, probably 20 are over bid already. I just pass on doing any price increase on these people or would better just raise them anyways to pad the margins. I'd like to keep as many customers as possible, but still give me some wiggle room, be profitable the rest of the year. On these customers, I'm planning on raising everyone else a minimum of $6 per week and 1.5 times the weekly rate for biweekly. So this last little part, you kind of speak out of both sides of your mouth by saying, hey, I'm, I'm trying to basically try, trying to be in profit mode and I'm trying to grow. So be careful of that. I'm not saying I'm not opposed to that, just be careful. Obviously the best way to increase prices is to people who are underpriced. So if you already know exactly which 20 you need to avoid because they're already overbid, then just leave them. The thing, the reason that I talk so much about like hit capacity, raise prices across the board is because the vast majority of people will push off price increases until next season or like till the off season when if they, they're living literally leaving tens of thousands of dollars on table, if they just tore the band aid off and yes, they might lose one or two of those overbid customers, but in the meantime make up for tens of thousands by raising across the other 110. Right. So I just generally think that like I want it done if you can Optimize it, make it more refined. Yes, do it on just 110 customers that are underpriced.

But.

I would also just be like, are you at capacity? Because if you're at capacity, this should be happening regardless. And you don't, you don't mind if people leave. If you're just like, well, I didn't really hit capacity. We're getting towards the end of spring rush. I'm trying to just kind of make a little bit more profit. I see where you're coming from in that. And in that case I'd probably do them more like hey, let's just raise on 110. But in general it's like are you at capacity is the determining factor of whether or not prices are raised. And at that point you become violent because you don't really care if someone leaves. So.

Abraham, would it be a good idea to purchase domain names for our city for Christmas lights that we can then integrate with our website? Example, preso has holidaylights.com Would this help with SEO on another here once again, so you can buy all the URLs you want.

But it's not going to. We're not going to do redirects on the main page. That hurts the domain authority. If we're just doing redirects all the time. So you can do this, but you would need to build the site yourself, etc. I want the domain authority of augustalights.com to just crush and so to do that I'm going to drive as much traffic as possible to it.

You're more than welcome to. And there's already a couple of locations that have done this in the past. They start their own URL. Totally fine. If you're going to use Max on it, it needs to be approved so you can send it to franchise GustalongarServices.com.

But you know there's other locations that just like put random Christmas lights decorations as like the branding and throw it up and use their city name. I just genuinely believe with our domain authority of all of our locations we'll be able to outrank a lot of those ones because the inconsistency of traff that otherwise happens when you have just a one off.

Holiday lights URL.

On another note, would it be possible on Copilot to optimize the estimates page so that after an estimate gets accepted we can see who's scheduled already from that page who's been followed up on with calls and Italy. So number two, Nick Davidson recommend this. This is on the board For Augusta kind of critical side of stuff. Inside Copilot from the estimates page, there'll be like buttons that you make, little radio buttons that you'll see how many times you followed up. And then if you toggle over it, you'll see the time and date that you actually did the follow up call.

In terms of number one, an estimate is accepted. We can see a schedule from that page.

Okay, I see what you're saying. Three, the ability to see a description of the estimate itself with out it opening to a whole new page. Like you mentioned, you channel the importance of follow ups. I feel the workflow on the estimate page should be better. I've used Angelus in the past and their follow ups is pretty good. Both on mobile and desktop. Maybe some similar to that. I don't know. Just an idea. Thanks. Yes, number two, I know is on the board.

The third one.

After an estimate gets accepted, we see who are accepted on the page. I thought you could filter that out. Okay, I'll look at this later. Abraham, I know number two is on the board for follow up stuff, for follow up calls. And then number two, I thought you could just filter down by this. But if not, I will take a look at that. I'd say it's more of a filter than anything, but we will take a look.

You can note one second.

All right.

Numero five, Ryan Payne. If you had to turn around on codes, where did you start? Leads? It isn't an issue in you have energy, force, liquidity.

Interesting commands. At the time we were 1.3 million in revenue. It was Brittany and I taking calls. This one's going to take me forever. Mercy and I have to be on this other call.

How about this, Ryan? I will make a video on this one specifically and I'll make post it tomorrow. I do have to hop on another call and I don't want to rush this. It's. This is going to take me more than five minutes, so.

Okay, I will make a video on this one specifically on the weekend. I do have to hop on this other call and so this one's going to. I don't want to rush this one. So I will. I'll make a separate video for this one. If not today, tomorrow, and I'll post it as a comment on this one so everyone can see it. All right, that is it for today. Thank you all. Have a fantastic Friday and you'll hear me on this one. I just don't want to rush this one. This is a long question. I have a sense of where it's going, so I want to make it sure it's not rushed. So thank you all. We'll see you tomorrow.