Mike Minutes Mastermind 05/29/2024

Hello, guess the nation. Hope you are doing amazing. You're gonna get this via text and stuff afterwards. I'm recording this and I'll send it out the message because I do have to jump right into some meetings so I didn't want to send out the message then. I know some people have said it's annoying when they get it 10, 15 minutes into the, into the live stream. So I'll just send at the end it'll be recording. But let's go ahead and jump into some questions.

Quick announcement. Actually one second before we get into this, let me just go back and I'll actually pull it up on the dashboard. If you go to augustafranchise.com log in, share this tab, go to your academy, go to Christmas Lights.

All of this is the same old, same old. There is a new.

Webinar coming up. Here's the link to join there. But at the very bottom I have added another vendor, Christmas Light Contractors. This is a smaller, a little bit of a smaller company but some of their pricing is very strong. Donovan is his name. We don't have as much like a training, we don't have a portal with them. They're just giving us 10% off the top. It's much more of a wholesaler pricing though. So the 10 is like pretty decent. So some, some basement I've seen they're cheaper than some parts of certified I would say if you like the certified lights layout of like the portal being able to order, having extra training, having the extra support from them directly, probably a good idea to use them. If you, if you're more established in Christmas lights and you kind of know what you're doing and you don't not going to need their support as much. This would be something I would take a look at now the one part that's really helpful that they're giving us is these discounted starter packages. And so these are the pricing they're going to give us which means includes 100ft of lights or a thousand feet of lights if you want to do it. The thousand feet of lights. You literally have enough lights to do it. An entire massive house to like kind of, you know the, you know the full extent. And what you could do is you could do it for like the July 4th on your house or Gold Star family and get the feel for the install process, see if it's something you wanted to do, see if it, see if you can see yourself doing it. You know, feel out what it's like to be on the ladders, etcetera so the very worst, you risk a thousand bucks instead of, you know, buying a whole bunch of stuff and doing marketing and all the rest of it and then it something that you just cannot stand. Um, so highly recommend this for anyone that's new. Highly recommend this. This again is not as like they don't have a portal for us or anything like that. There is a recommended training series. I recommend this for everyone to watch this. It's about three years old and they are in the process of making one just for a guestination, a completely revamped video training series for us. But I wanted to get this out as soon as possible. So feel free to watch these videos. I think it'd be super helpful in terms of installation, the whole process, etc. I know we're doing a bunch of in person stuff. Jason Murphy's doing one, there's Certified Lights is doing one in Dallas in August. So those are awesome. But if you want to jump into the video stuff, they have a good 10 part series to like from start to finish. Really, really good stuff. Donovan's the name of our contact, there's his email and then that's how you're gonna get the 10% off. So I'd recommend is to go to their website, look at what you want and then just basically email your order so you can get the discounted pricing. So a little bit more janky in terms of how to do that compared to Certified Lights where it's a portal and it's, you know, you got our own support. So I would personally just like, because I have no shoe in the game here in terms of, you know, we don't get any kickbacks whatsoever. If I was you and you were new, I would probably go Certified Lights because the amount of support that they're giving us, even if they're like 5 or 10% more expensive, if you're more experienced and price is the main concern for you, I would definitely check the Christmas lights contractors that just be my 2 cents in my recommendation. Of course I wasn't sharing my screen. Seriously. Sorry guys. This is this, this is the page I was looking at the dashboard at the very bottom here. This is the information I was just talking about with our website. Email Donovan, the discounted package prices, etc. So sorry about that. That is why I needed to use my split screen. Thank you. Sorry about that. My apologies. So all information on the dashboard underneath Academy Christmas Lights and you'll see it all there.

All right, let's not show this screen.

Come on. Go away. Thank you. And I'LL present this other screen. Boom. All right, we got seven questions for today. Very good. One second. Make sure my audio check one. Okay. Okay. First question is from Kyle Tarvin. I wanted to get more clarity on the buy now pay later Christmas lights deal from Certified Lights. Ah, very good. Yes. I put this on the other day. Do we just have to go onto the Augusta Lights website and order the lights before June 30th and we will automatically get enrolled in the buy now pay later or how do we actually get that from yesterday's Mastermind? It sound like we would buy the product from Certified Lights but wouldn't have to pay until October. Great. Email is going to be the way because if you just want to check out the portal is why they made that, which is great for like last minute. You know, if you're, you know, you sold the job and it's October and you want to get the lights immediately within a few days. That's a great portal email lights gustalongerservices.com go straight to certified Lights and they have a whole department for us in terms of support. So recommend that from yesterday's Mastermind. Sound like we would buy the product from certified but wouldn't have to pay until October. Correct. So it's the advanced place product placement. You can buy the product and then six weeks of payments starting in October, which allows you to sell, get all the lights basically to you and then you don't pay on it and it's split up over six weeks when you're usually selling the most lights anyways. So it really helps with a from a cash flow perspective. So if you're very confident you're selling lights, use that.

And then again the pricing I negotiate with them allows us to keep the same pricing all the way through the office like throughout the whole season. So just keep in mind like I negotiated that so that way the low the new operators wouldn't be affected by having to pay 80 or 90 cents a bulb instead of the 55 cents. That was my main contention because I want people to get a taste of it and not to be priced out of the market simply because or have to pay retail prices essentially because they're small and they're just getting started. So.

Jason Murphy, as we add more locations, what are your thoughts on employee benefits? Group health care coverage could be fantastic along with retirement options, 401k et cetera. I feel this is one aspect of culture that's difficult to attack as individual units. Yeah. So when we had 50 locations, I'd attack this I'm going to attack it again probably when we hit about 250.

So based upon the coverage of what states we're in as well as the fact that we're international now adds a little more complexity. The international part is almost impossible because I looked into that even at 50 locations. But the reason it's so difficult is every state has different requirements, very different requirements. So the 401k is a little easier. That being said, I'd recommend everyone use guideline inside of QuickBooks. You can run this for like very cheap to get the package started. It's very simple. There's really no way like no added benefit to doing a group thing. It's so cheap to get started and then you can always add like based upon certain people to match or whatever. So it's relatively affordable. If you're trying to think about 401k, I think if enough people start using Guideline, I'd venture out, approach them and try to be a preferred vendor with them and try to like hopefully get like smaller packages cut to basically zero to get people indoor, which I think we could do. The 401k is easier though because it's more of a national program. Like government versus the state by state is so different for health insurance. It's just, it's like a whole can of worms. So I'm willing to attack this when we get a little bit larger so I have a little more bot purchasing power. When we went to other companies last time to try to do like a national program, we have stuff like Allstate gave us some stuff. It's small though. Like it's not enough for me to be like it's like 30% cheaper or 25% cheaper. It's like they give us some free benefits like you know, telehealth and stuff like that. But it wasn't enough to be like this is way better than just getting it through QuickBooks and integrating it way easier or gusto. Like both of those products are so much more integrated into your payroll. And so I can't confidently be like it's the best for everyone. And until we get more locations and we have several hundred people in the program, it's not going to move the needle a whole lot. So that's just the truth, honestly. David Vanderbrink from St. Matthews, Kentucky. I am working on hiring my first full time employee and have a question about the interview workflow. Is it best to do a phone screening before an interview, an in person interview? What types of basic questions should I ask to Go over before scheduling a full interview so as not to waste my time or the interview's time. So if you're doing phone screening, again, this is another filter in the funnel of getting more applicants. So if you're getting tons of applicants, phone screening is great. Saves you time, save you from having to miss appointments, etc. If you're, if you're getting one applicant a week, you're probably just going to try to get them in front of you as soon as possible and not put extra filters in the funnel. So it really comes down to what is your quote unquote lead flow or applicant flow. If you have a ton, I would recommend doing phone screening command center. It's part of the department. They can do this for you and they have a process for that. In terms of what questions you're asking, you're really trying to validate. Like you're just trying to like ask the three or four high level questions that you would in person otherwise just to screen people out. Right. It's amazing how people like show up and they don't have a driver's license. They have absolutely no idea what a lawn, lawnmower is. They've never done like you just ask those basic questions to weed out 30 for 40% of people that will either a not show up to an interview anyways or show up and not be qualified and you're just wasting your time. So again, you only do that though if you have, no, if you have tons of applicants. If you have one applicant come in a week, you're probably just going to like follow up with them just to get them to interview. Like you just need them in front of you. I've been hoping to hire someone from within my community, church or school, but have not had any interest yet beyond part time work. So I'm putting the application out more broadly. Having never hired someone before, I would appreciate help figuring out when what I need to discern when I'm hiring someone I have absolutely no connection with. Thanks. Yeah. So David, when you come for training, a lot of this stuff is covered. I would say that the 17 question part question thing on the hiring process inside the academy, if you're really new to interviewing, you literally just use it. I know a lot of people print that off and they're just literally right next to it during the interview process. And then you could pick off like the top four or five that you want to do during the phone process to kind of weed people out. I would recommend not going to your church or school. I know there's a level of trust there because of familiarity, family stuff like that. You have more trust built up with them. But a lot of times that first employee, they join, if they know you, because they know you. And as the business grows, a lot of times.

A lot of times if the business grows, and when it grows, you will not have that connection with them anymore in the business. And usually they will leave. And a lot of times it sours the personal relationship, to be honest.

So it gets easier, actually, as you grow bigger. And now there's people I know outside of work that work for me. But because there's layers of management between us, this. It makes it a little bit easier to, like, if someone needs to be reprimanded or fired or whatever, or their direct report to me where I will hand out, you know, critical feedback. But it's a weird gray area when you have like four or five, six employees and you kind of got to treat everyone like they're just minions, like, like just to do the work. This is the honest truth. They're. You're an octopus and you have tentacles. And they are all. They're still connected back to you. And you have to treat them all equally. And if you don't, then you're going to get messed up. As you grow, then you can move people into management or you can have layers of management between you people, you know, to make sure that, like, standards are enforced and there is no.

You know, familial or personal stuff that is happening. So, like, for me, if I know someone, I either want them as my direct report, so I have direct communication with them. There can't be miscommunication because, like, I have a direct line or if I know them, they are between me and another manager that is going to ensure that standards are upheld. What gets murky is when you hire somebody and they're kind of reporting to you, but then there's like seven or eight other people that are reporting to you, and you've got to treat them all equally. It's very difficult. And as the business grows, the person who knows you thinks you're changing, when in reality you must change in order for the business to grow. You can't treat them like you were before when they were just you and one person in the truck. And I learned that the hard way.

Mr. Anonymous, you've said before that most business owners quit right before they make it. I wouldn't say right before. I wouldn't say right before. But before exponential, like before the returns of success really start to take place. I would say yes. How do you know when you're right around the corner of success versus it's time to realize you're not cut out for entrepreneurship? Good question.

Let's say you're trying to lose 20 pounds in the gym or you're trying to gain a certain amount of muscle and you're like, I want to lose 20 pounds. All right, so you're at 18 pounds and you know it's coming up on you. It's a lot easier to stay in the game because you know it is literally 10% more and you're going to hit the hit. The goal in business is not that way because you can't control your lead flow or your applicant flow. You can't. You don't know what team members are coming to you and you don't know what customers are coming to you. So you don't know if a big contractor around the corner, et cetera. So the indefinite nature of hitting your target is very difficult with business compared to something like losing weight. Here's another scenario though. If someone loses 18 pounds and all of a sudden they go for five, six months and they can't lose the last two, also very demoralizing, also within 10% of their goal. So the same thing is true in business is someone can be grinding a very long time and still just be a couple moves, a couple customers or a couple hires away from the tipping point. A lot of times this happens when a location goes into profit mode and they don't have a great general manager and then eventually they get a good general manager and immediate, the location just takes off either profit wise or revenue wise. A lot of times that is the, that would, I would say is like you, you felt like you were spinning your wheels, but you're getting the customers, you're building the foundation. And like back to some of these might see me post recently on social media like, it is dig, build, bury, and that's a foundation you dig, you work crazy hard, then you build something. This is like your foundational of your first hundred customers, recurring revenue, your first employee, et cetera. Then you bury it, which means you forget about it like it's horrible and painful and is required to build the rest of the success of the business that everyone sees multiple locations, nicer trucks, all the things everyone wants to see is built on a foundation of like usually three to five years of absolute pain and torture. Like absolute, I would wish on nobody.

But no one sees it because once we've built the foundation, you bury it and you just leave it alone. Like, you don't even want to think about it. I don't even want to think about certain aspects of, like, stuff that, like, I've done. Like, I don't even want it. It's. It's painful. Like, this is why you see, like, some people in interviews, like, when they think back to, they will, like, just tear up. It's very, very hard moments in life.

And so the hardest part about business is you don't know when that's going to come. You don't know when next hire. You don't know the next customer is coming. So all you can do is keep digging and keep building a foundation. And then when things start to take off, you start to build the actual business. Like, the successful part that people actually have that now you have evidence of success, you bury the foundation, and you don't even think about it. You don't think about all the pain and torture you went through. And to do so is actually very hard.

And so this is why you'll see me get emotional when I talk about, like, really, really hard moments in the business. When I went to Africa, like, there are things that happened and hard things that were done that, like, just thinking about them is extremely, excruciatingly painful.

And.

You don't know if it's around the corner. And I would say if you do know it's around the corner, say, for example, your target is, I want to make 500,000 annual revenue, and you're at 450. What happens if it takes three years to get from 450 to past 500, but in that third year, you get a great general manager or you get an awesome contract, or all of a sudden your Facebook ads go from $40 a lead down to five bucks. Like, what if that happens? You don't know. That's the hard part about business versus almost any other metric. You can't control the inflow, right? You can only control your actions. You can only dig, build, and bury. That's the only thing you can do after that, the success of the business after that. A lot of it is depending on a lot of other factors, some of which are out of your control. But what you can control is the foundation. That's the. That's the effort that goes into that is painful. You don't want to talk about it. It's extremely excruciating. But it's required to build everything else after that.

And sometimes you don't know how deep you have to dig, and that's painful. And it takes longer and you have to dig deeper and takes more pain than you would anticipate it and no one ever sees that. You do not see the foundation.

Bryson from Colorado Springs. I hit the 20k threshold this month. You drop Bryson. I spoke to Nick yesterday and he said I would be locked in as far as the amount I have to pay in years time for the growth model. However, there was a question on three mastermind that was about this topic and maybe I took it the wrong way but it seemed like the opposite was true since I'm on the one year path already. Is the current price locked in for me or will that bar possibly move later this year? Thanks for clearing this up. Okay, let me make a very firm decision on this because I in hindsight as I heard like listen to myself talk yesterday, I also thought it was murky. So I'm going to go ahead and lock this in. When you signed your fed and paid that's going to be the time it locks in. So for example Bryson, you will be locked in at $1200 per month since in a year you'll be signing up after the change in the in the period. I know what I said yesterday was a little bit murky as I was saying it. I was like I have not nailed this down. That's in part when I do these live masterminds. Sometimes these things I haven't actually fully fleshed out with the team and so I got to be careful with what I say. So I apologize for that. Here's the determining factor. When you signed up and you paid for a solo operator model. If you're upgrading the growth model, if you signed on there, the reason I can say that confidently is because in your ftd, in your FA it says that, it says it's going to go to 1200 when you switch the growth model. So then you're good. Whatever you signed we will live by. So hope that clears it up again. There's double edged sword of being doing these master. I do not look at these questions so like they hit me and then I'm like processing in my brain sometimes. So I probably should have said just give me some time on it yesterday but I thought I had thought it through and I hadn't. So we will just say this. Whatever you signed is what we will live by and what you signed is that it's going to go to 1200 and so if you've signed and paid for that, you're locked in. Let's go. So I apologize for making that a little bit murky yesterday because I As I was saying, I was like, oh, like when they lock it in, if you signed on it, you're good. Sorry for the confusion on that.

Okay. Landon Smith, Tallahassee, Florida I believe that you talked about Copilot coming up with a version that doesn't need Internet to operate. That way when crews aren't in the bad service areas, they can still see the routes and notes. Right now we use WhatsApp for the crew to see their notes and route. When they have bad service, the crew has also know that the app drains their battery pretty fast. Obviously they bring a charger. But I was wondering if this is something that we can or will be better in the future. So my questions 1. Do you know when if this update to Copilot is coming out? So we can only go through that instead of having to go through WhatsApp or other another software to help? Yeah. So if you're in bad service areas, basically it's a web based app so it doesn't have an offline mode. We are creating an offline mode. Again. We stopped all development on stuff in back in January. We were shooting not to release it in January. So the restructuring of the API called REST API is in the works. I'm not going to give a timeline on it, but it is in the works. It is something we are working on and it'll basically be where you can toggle to offline mode. So if you drop just toggle the offline mode, you see all your notes, you can attach pictures, all the rest of it and then as soon as you connect back to the Internet, it'll dump all that information and it would track time and all the rest of it. So it is coming. I'm not going to give a timeline on it because this just keeps biting me in the butt. Eventually we will be once we're back on the full track of development, we'll get better, that sort of thing. But I'm just not going to and I hope you understand why it's not because I don't want to. It's just a matter of I don't want to give false expectations. Two, is the battery issue pretty much an inevitable issue of using any software or it'll get better with time. Any web based app is going to use a little more battery. But really the big battery thing is like anytime you're tracking time on a device, it is actively working. It has to run in the background and so we. If you disabled tracking time, you'd probably be helpful. But honestly I think most people need to have a charger in their truck anyways. Even if you literally made it where they were. It was a connector to your cigarette lighter with like a multiple like Android and Apple or like C and Lightning and just like taped it to it so no one could take it out. That solved the issue there. Anytime you're tracking time and if they're. Because like if they have multiple stops, they're using their GPS all day long. They're using time tracking the background. So the app is running in the background the whole time. And you want that you need them to have. If you want to track their like they're on the gps you have to have that. If you disable.

Tracking of their device it would also save battery. But again you really want to have that especially I know it down the road we want to build and that's in app note in app navigation instead of having to go outside of it. Things like that down the road are going to be super useful especially so that customers from the client portal actually be able to see where their crew is on their way instead of not knowing. They could like they can get an on the way notification and see on the map if that device has that enabled. I wouldn't recommend changing that. That's the thing that's probably sucking the most battery and the time tracking with the app being open the background. But those things are required in order to be able to track the device on the map. So if that's like a huge concern, I would say disable the ability to track their device. They can do that from their own app inside and that would probably cut down like 15, 20% and then time tracking probably take another 5% of their battery. But again I would just get a lightning scene. I got a lightning and a USB C connector and like connect it somehow so that people don't take it out of the truck and roll with that because they're using the GPS alone will like between all the locations their stops will be a lot.

Derek Duran Alan Park I was searching for the website you built for listing businesses to see what businesses may be for sale and price ranges. I heard that was shut down because of legal hoops and challenges. Can you elaborate on the issues you face with that? Yeah, several things. One, only about 5% of businesses listed got sold inside of Augusta Nation. Usually within. If someone. If someone needed to sell and they have like six months. We have a pretty good rate of people that will end up buying. If someone's rushed to close down because of personal reasons, those are the people who you don't even list and but if someone has like six months they A lot of Lee would know the exact number but I would guess probably 50 to 60 of locations that list have sold in that six month window. I know there's another location that's getting sold here pretty soon and they've again, they had plenty of time. They didn't. They were in a rush. They just, hey, I eventually want to sell this. I'm just going to keep recruiting the business until I sell it.

At 5%. That's what was the issue on that listing. The other issue is people came after me when and I couldn't vet the the like it was a free service for crying out loud. But yet somehow I was held liable when transactions would go play through and then people had issues with the transaction. It's like, look, I'm just a marketplace here. But then they would come after me and it's not worth the brand hit. Like for me personally to be like mike, Andy's made this tool and someone cheated me using the tool to sell their business. I don't want to be involved. This was a free tool that cost me tens of thousands of dollars to build the infrastructure for and I'm getting in trouble for something. I know money, it doesn't make any sense. So yeah, there was low throughput like actual Results. Only about 5% of people sold this buy sell doesn't have much better of a percentage of people selling but they have a paid service to weed out the garbage which is actually really profitable. But I didn't. It was a distraction from Augusta and copilot so it just had to be cut. Like I'm not going to legal up and spend money on those sort of resources when I should be focused on Augusta and copilot. And it stinks because it was a good tool and there were people that sold their businesses and unfortunately I'm just not going to spend a bunch of time, energy, money and legal resources towards something that makes absolutely no money and doesn't really help the things I'm most passionate about. Like it stinks because it would have been good for the industry in the long term and maybe down the road we'll figure something out. I don't want to make it a paid thing. I was just trying to help sometimes, you know, good intention. Every good intention. What does it say? Like good intentions are always not rewarded. Yeah, I forget they're saying. Anyways. All right, I love you all. I hope you have a fantastic Wednesday. I will send this recording out right now and we'll see you tomorrow. Take care.