Mike Minutes Mastermind 05/27/2022

Hello, guestination. Hope you're all doing super well. My Internet is horrible. I'm on a mobile hotspot. I've been driving around for the past 15 minutes trying to find a better spot. This is obviously horrible service so I'm not going to do too much in detail in terms of showing you some designs and things. I'll do a video on the weekend showing that so it's better resolution. I apologize for that. But this should be one of the last ones I'm doing on the road here this week. So let's go over a few things. First and foremost, I will have those designs up and ready with an updated Indeed ad with the text that you can use. I'll have that later today up for everybody. Also, Nampa IAHO is going for sale. It was a partnership and they just decided to, you know, some of the partners just were not interested in running the business anymore and the other one was interested in being out in the field all day. So it's less than a year old. They have over 70 mowing customers. They haven't been accepting any new estimates since like six weeks ago. So some good opportunity there. It's going to go for $50,000, includes all the equipment and everything. I'm going to have that available. I'll post it on the Facebook group. So if you're interested in that, it's in Nampa, Idaho and the that location is just tearing it up. They because right next door is Cameron, who is also just got started a few months ago and is. Is bursting it seems so just a. It's a really, really good market. If anyone's interested, let us know. Obviously we'd rather give it to an existing owner instead of having to go find somebody else outside of the system. So I'll post that later today and then we are going to try to let that be given to the public as an opportunity just because they do want to be able to maintain the customers until they can find a buyer. So. All right, let's see here. I think we got some questions that came in. I first wanted to go over the acquisition details and what I've been doing this past week is the turnover. So let me make sure I have my correct audio. Good. Okay. So for those of you who probably already know and some of you do not know, I am this past week was turning around the Mount Vernon Augusta Long Care location which is right next to Bellingham, the third, 30 minutes away drive and south of Bellingham. I actually used to own this location and then I had a general Manager, which was Timothy, my brother came in, became the general manager. And then now as of last Saturday, we acquired the location. And so I'm not going to make a public video about it, regardless of whether or not he's my brother or not. It's not something that I wouldn't ever embarrass a franchisee about or talk about, you know, personal stuff in that regard. But I felt like part, as everyone in Augusta Nation, you all kind of deserve to know. And I don't want rumors floating around without everyone just having the. The solid truth. So we took it over. Tim was out of the country in Africa, doing nonprofit work that he's really passionate about. And the two and a half weeks that he was gone, the business really started to fall apart. The employees just were not showing up. Lots of unhappy customers, multiple reports of the Better Business Bureau, lots of negative online reviews, and really it's a bad brand image. And there's five other locations within proximity of Mount Vernon. And so I first and foremost didn't want the brand to suffer, which it was. And they started losing a lot of customers. They weren't showing up to properties, etc. Furthermore, and this is the part that is personal, but I felt like I needed to share with all of you, and that is Tim did have some personal and mental health issues that he was working through, causing a lot of the business struggles and hiring decisions and the way that they were running the business and unfortunately causing him to really get outside the systems they were doing, weren't doing over the phone estimates, they weren't doing P4P. They were doing salary for frontline employees. They had two office people.

They were had to have an office building and the overhead was extravagantly. It was just way over horrible. They were negative 40% profit in the month of April and expected something similar, if not worse in the month of May. And so this is no fault in my opinion of Tim. I think he's a great person, obviously is my brother, I love him a lot. But ultimately the brand cannot suffer and ultimately the customers and the employees can't suffer. And then furthermore, if someone's going so far out of the systems and then causing other franchisees and talking about what they're doing and causing other franchisees to go off the rails. I have to step in. Every single franchisee that that declared a state of emergency week prior was connected directly to Tim and had been starting to listen to a lot of the different things that he was doing outside the systems, including having his own office person having an office Staff not doing over the, the phone estimates, not doing P4P et cetera, et cetera. And again, I do not blame him. There was. There's things that he needs in terms of medication and health side of things that I. I do not blame him as a person. But this is something that we could not allow to happen and continue on. And obviously I'm over most of the emotion now, but last week was pretty rough. Just making sure obviously delineate between business and personal things. But at the end of the day.

Regardless of someone's familial orientation to myself, regardless of anything, the brand cannot suffer. And you all have seen me step in one time before and close a location that had just gotten started because of what the owner was doing. This specific location had already been established for a few years. It had some value and.

I was able to actually step in, purchase it. And I'm putting a general manager in place. The manager is actually someone who just worked at the Bellingham location and had never done an estimate, never managed people, never hired, never done any of that. But because the systems are in place, they're going to step in and I believe be very successful. And they won't be doing any estimates. They're on the six week program. There's not any scheduled estimates. They're doing over the phone only. We cut out about 30% of all the customers because they're just too far away out of the service area.

We reduced all of the staff outside of two or three. We cut the office staff immediately. We rehired them at command center. We were able to negotiate the lease down by more than 60% of what they were proposing because of the office that was causing people to have to be rezoned and it was out of compliance. And so therefore the rent was going to be $2,000 a month. We started at 4,000, got them down to 2,000 and then now down to 800. So that's because they don't no longer have an office where there's computers and wi fi and all the rest of it. So all of that to say I just want to be open and honest with everyone. I don't want any rumors floating around. I notified the locations that were directly surrounding that Mount Vernon location last week because they are going to have direct impact and they're going to have customers that were giving off to some of these locations. They're too far away from what I believe is an ideal service area and smaller.

But I wanted everyone to know just so that there's not rumors or anything like that floating around. That's why I took the location over. And if I see there's value in a location, then I don't mind buying it. I don't mind giving it, putting general manager in place. I don't mind general manager taking that place over down the road. But ultimately the brand cannot be hurt. And whether that is me closing down locations or taking them over, we will do so to preserve everyone's brand around that surrounding area. And as we get closer to each other and we have more franchisees, this is something that I get involved in pretty heavily when someone's starts getting way outside the systems and affecting other owners. Like I said, the systems of P4P over the phone estimates not having an office staff, all of those things are systems. And the video I think I actually went that I went out public this morning is a good listen because it talks about systems feeling like constraining sometimes feeling that it's almost like a cast when you put it on a broken bone, you don't have full range of motion. I understand that, you know, there's certain systems that feels you're constricted to some extent. But ultimately it's for the protection of the business. And so when someone like Timothy gets outside the systems, gets very manic and starts to go off, way off on a limb.

They start to hurt themselves and the business suffers and employees suffer and the brand suffers. And when the brand starts to suffer, I will step in. So I don't mind answering any questions about that. Obviously I'm not gonna make a public video about it. I will never make a public video about a franchisee that makes them look embarrassed or makes them look bad.

But ultimately I just wanted all of you to know. So again, there's nothing floating around that why things happen the way they did. So feel free. If you have comments or questions, post here. And I think this might be one about it. Let's see here. Had to fire someone. Oh, there's a different one. Had to fire someone because he cussed me out in front of everyone. Me and my three others can handle the work for the rest of the year with cushion. Should I still hire or just hoard that cash this year?

I think it really comes down to if you want to keep growing. Connor. Right. If you're getting a lot of leads and you still think there's opportunity to grow this year, there's no problem with continuing to hire one more person. I'm a big believer. And you want at least one person. Like if you're one more person away. If someone else left tomorrow, if you'd be in a really bad spot, I'd go hire somebody. You want to have that cushion? You want to know that someone left tomorrow, you'd be okay. And if someone left today, you're like, okay, we're fine, we're okay. But if you have where another person leaves and you'd be in a really bad spot, you definitely want to be hiring someone. You don't want to be put in the position where, you know, another person leaves and now you are really behind.

You and your family are in repairs, brother. I appreciate the caliber of leadership and transparency display. I don't know who that was. I'll check later. Thank you. I appreciate that. All right, let's go ahead and jump into some questions that came in on the mic minutes form. Let me just share this.

Cool. And next month, what I will do in terms of the acquisition and the transition that we're doing here is I'll give more numbers because right now, obviously I'm not showing any numbers. But once we have a solid month behind us, I will show exactly what's happened over the next six weeks to turn things around. Like I said, as always, we have to check the bleeding. We have to stop the bleeding first. And that was firing employees that just should not have been there. Turn everyone over from payroll or from salary to P4P. So far, all those people have not left the ones that we wanted to keep and switch from salary to P4P. No one left.

So that's gonna again, I'm not gonna say that quite yet because it's only been a week, but so far, so good. And I want to have in a month financial data and the numbers behind the whole transition and what we're doing to get everything back on systems. And that means cutting out customers, it means going back and fixing customers properties. And it's just damage control, massive amounts of damage control this week. And so it's not easy, but I think it's going to be really good for me to see this firsthand with the six week step. Six weeks, six, man. I always get confused, man. Six week, six step defense strategy and declaring a state of emergency, which we have done in that location. All right, let's go ahead and jump in. Dustin from Bloomington. I end up wanting to double check myself. I go, I used to go through all my customers and the year check average times and make sure we were hitting our average, hitting our hourly rate on average. I wondered your input on how often to be doing this, obviously with customers in the past. We are hitting our rate after price increases during the off season on new customers. I want to make sure I have a lot enough time for the crew, both on regular estimates and over the phone calculator. Would you recommend price increases mid year? If any of these are off, I don't mind. Especially when you're behind, right? So if an employee left, that's like the first sign for me is like, hey, look, if you're behind, go ahead and cut out customers that are far away and raise prices. And at the very worst, it's always funny how people still stay with you and you make more money on them, so it's fine. But then it's also, you don't feel bad because you don't need the work, right? So when we cut all these employees like this turnover, for example, immediately we had way too much work. So what did we do? We immediately went in, just started canceling jobs we didn't want, raising prices, dropping the jobs we didn't want, and rectifying the business by creating that scarcity of supply of labor. And so it really comes down to the labor side of things. If you have plenty of workers and you need more jobs, you're probably not going to be raising prices right now. But if you have, you know, work coming out of your ears and not enough labor, you're probably going to raise prices immediately. So that would be my recommendation. Mid year. I usually am not 104, but this is like a great time. Middle of the spring rush. I love fall. I love. Because they can't get estimates anywhere else. Like no one else is giving out estimates. And we're winning jobs right now, like down here over the phone because people are like, oh man, you answered your phone. And like, I got a. I actually got a price, like, because everyone's so busy. So keep in mind, if we're busy, everyone else is busy too. And they're not, they're not getting estimates out. And it's your opportunity to be able to raise prices. How do you guys handle damage cases such as storm door glass break or car window break? It really comes down to each customer. Sometimes customers would rather have it fixed themselves and then we just reimburse them, which I prefer because it doesn't take a whole bunch of admin time. But sometimes people are annoyed by the fact that they have to set it all up and get an estimate and all that stuff. And then that case, we do everything. And I'd say most of the time we do it for them because we don't have to go through the hassle. But if they're going to be really, really picky, it's like, look, just get whatever you want, send us the receipt and we'll pay it back. That's kind of how we handle it. But usually we will get an estimator out there. We develop a relationship with a glass person. They get out there and we can, we can go from there. But sometimes the customer, ideally the customer is wants actually do handle that process themselves. Because the admin time of a damage case is actually the most intensive, like getting the estimate out there, accepting the estimate, following up with the bid, accepting it, making sure they're scheduled to come out, communicate with the customer when they're going to come out. Rather just have the vendor like the glass person deal with the customer, let them know when they're coming and everything. And then I just get a receipt and I pay it back. That's the most ideal. But it's kind of case by case basis, honestly.

Columbus, hello. We are using Service Autopilot and the team is using V3 service autopilot, which is the team app for anyone that doesn't know because the mapping feature is awesome, which it is for them to visualize their route. We use this app last year in the top and at the top of their specific job. They could pause the job if they needed to. For some reason this year the pause button is gone. It just has a skip button. I've tried to edit their roles and writes to fix all, but no avail. Do you have a fix this problem or can you put me in contact with SA rep or SA Genius that can help me? Thank you. Yeah, that's why most people do not use the TMAP version 3 of Service Autopilot is because there's just so many things they're changing and bugs and like the most random things will leave like a pause button. Like you can't change the status to pause. So this is why we don't use it just because, hey, I'm okay with someone making changes and improving things, but it just like you got to put the pause button back and that's not something that should take months and months. So I don't have a fix for it. And unfortunately we don't even have a like a good account manager at Service Autopilot. We literally go through their help support ticket system and most time don't hear back from them even after weeks. So again, I know there's gonna be a lot of issues with Super. I really do know that there already is. And bugs and things. But the bottom line is they help us and they address these issues and within a couple weeks they'll fix the problems that are really outstanding. So I apologize for this. Logan. I know you guys use v3 for the app side, the team app, and I really like that functionality. Be able to see the map. I love it, absolutely love it. There were just too many bugs. A year and a half, two years ago, we test it out and I still see quite a few times people will say things like this, like something will just disappear. And then when you call in, the support team has no idea what's going on. They say, well, we'll create a ticket for the tech team, but it takes months and months to fix little simple things like adding the pause button back in. So I apologize. Just something we can't control. And I know there's gonna be problems and there are problems with super, but at least we have an ear there and someone's listening and trying to make changes for us and on a monthly basis is rolling those out. So that's all I can say. And so I'm sorry.

I'm currently at $70 per hour. I'm thinking about dropping to $60 to scale up and maybe next year go back up. I'm not sure if my market will or will not take that price. What are your thoughts? I'd recommend not changing your hourly rate. I'd rather you do E fees and dump fees for free, potentially.

And not changing your hourly rate. Keep in mind, the customer doesn't see the hourly rate, they just see the price. Right. So I would rather you keep it at 70, but maybe instead of charging six budget hours for a cleanup, you charge five. Like to the customer, that's going to be the same. But I wouldn't change your hourly rate. Mostly due to the fact that if you change your hourly rate, you got to go change your budget hours on every single job on recurring. So I would recommend keeping it the same and then just either A, trimming budget hours on projects or. Or B.

Just cutting out E fees, dump fees, et cetera on projects as well. In terms of getting that scale, getting that momentum, I agree with the premise of lowering the price to get that momentum 100%. But it's a matter of.

Being able to.

Sorry, I was reading this other question. It's just a matter of being able to keep that budget hours and your hourly rate consistent as much as possible. I'd go your eps and your dump fees first. If you're trying to cut price and then talk about Your budget, your. Your hourly rate. Hourly rate is harder to change because you're affecting P4P and you're affecting budget hours on every single recurring job.

Can you find or recommend a mapping app that we can use now until Zooper gets theirs done? There's several out there. Feel free to go on the Facebook group. There's been a few that have been mentioned. In terms of routing. Routing is inside Zooper, but the mapping part is on the mobile app. It is on the desktop and actually really like what they do in terms of showing the direction of the driving and the travel. It shows drive time and work budget hours based upon a certain route. So it's really great. It's gonna be really good for scheduling down the road because, you know, right now we're like, hey, you know, budget six hours of mowing 75 efficiency. Assume that when you're looking at the dispatch board now with Zooper, it shows you the drive time and it shows you the number of budget hours. So you should be able to take that and just like add that up to be eight. Right. If you're wanting someone to work eight hours. So that's really good. On the mobile version, they do not have the mapping feature. We are one of the biggest pushes we have for them before January is to redo their dispatch board and we'll see what they come up with because again, we don't own super or anything. But I really like the dispatch board is one of the strongest points of service autopilot. It really, really is. And one of the things that I will miss about them. I know. Well, I don't know. I doubt we can match how great. I think the dispatch board service offer is really, really good as you scale and grow. I know it's a little more confusing when you're smaller to understand. I understand. But for complex jobs, it's great. And we're trying to get with Zooper to redesign their dispatch board in a manner that's going to be a little bit more like service autopilot, which has the mapping on top there. But all that say, I don't know what Zooper is going to do in terms of mapping routing app. Until then, I really feel like the desktop version is solid enough for your size. Ken, in terms of using the maps part of Zooper, you can see the route, you can do the routing and the scheduling from the map, but we got it. The way that they integrate maps and the dispatch board in service opera is great and I'm hoping Zooper can duplicate that somewhat so. But yeah, there's. I know if there's. If you, if you're wanting to get a different routing app or different mapping app besides super, there's a few people have mentioned some different websites on the Facebook group. I feel free to check those out. But I feel like what's in super now is fine. Especially for the smaller locations. If you go to maps, go to routes, you can see the route and there it's just not integrated very well with the dispatch board, which I'm hoping they can improve. All right, everyone, I hope you have a great rest of your day and a great weekend. Like I said, as the turnaround is completed and after a month's worth of data, once the GM has been set up there and everything, we will have financial data. I can show you and show you the whole transition and everything. But just more matter right now of this past week has been good for me to see the emergency plan in action as well as get a general manager in there that was literally just mowing lawns a week ago and is now a GM.

And just we had to fire employees, a room full of employees and it's the first time I've ever packed a gun into a firing session. So that was interesting. So, yeah, it's going to be good learning for myself and be able to help when locations need to go in a state of emergency and need to immediately switch to profitability mode. And I'm going to show kind of how that all looks hopefully next month once we have a good month under our belt of good data. So I appreciate all of you. Last thing, like I already mentioned, there's nothing against Tim. Tim has nothing against Augusta Lawn Care at all. And I know this is like just weird because he's my brother, but I would do this for any franchisee and I have to really separate business from that side of me because I have to protect the brand. And so it's not easy. But I think it's a positive experience for myself and for us to really bulletproof and test the six week program for emergency planning and switch someone over to profitability. So thank you all so very much. I appreciate it. Have a great rest of your weekend. Take care.