Mike Minutes Mastermind (05/31/22)

Hello, Augusta Nation. Hope you're all doing super well. I have no idea what my bandwidth to my WI fi is so low, so hopefully it's not too grainy for you. I'm gonna go ahead and get started. There was no questions that came in on the form on the weekend, but I have several things I wanted to go over. It's the last month or last day of May, and so a few things I wanted to go over. First and foremost, when it comes to scheduling, I would highly recommend scheduling people the night of, if possible. If you have an accepted estimate. I know it's. I know you're busy, and I know it's sometimes hard to even know when exactly you can put them on. So this is what I'd recommend because a lot of times, a lot of the phone calls that are coming in right now is just people wanting to know when they're on the schedule because they've accepted the estimate. Like, hey, I accept the estimate. I just want to know when I'm on the. On the schedule. And we have no information. We don't know. Or furthermore, if someone puts them on the schedule and then we give them a date, but that date starts to move around. So this is what we're going to do. If you plan on moving a job like a project around on the schedule, put it in the office notes. So put it on the calendar. You know, send them the thank you and welcome email. Be a little more vague. Be like, hey, we'll be there, you know, next week, or whatever you're trying to do. If you're not calling confident on your scheduling, I want you to put them on the schedule as soon as possible. So that way we don't have people who's constantly calling, when am I on the schedule? When I'm on the schedule. When I'm on schedule. But if you plan on moving them around, make sure you put in the office notes. That'd be for service autopilot. You could put in customer intelligence for super. Because right now a lot of calls are coming in, like, when am I on the schedule? When I'm on the schedule, I could accept three days ago, I haven't heard back. So if you just put them on schedule the night of and send them a thank you and welcome email and then put them, you know, schedule their job. But then make sure you put an office note for service autopilot, customer intelligence for Zooper, stating that you've scheduled them but the date is subject to change or you potentially might move it or whatever it might be. Because that's going to be the easiest way to number one, reduce your call volume if people always asking when on the calendar. And then two, if you're not really sure because employees are leaving, you got a bunch of newbies or whatever it might be, there's weather issues, just make a note in the office notes that say when you schedule the job, just put an office, an office note saying we schedule this for this date, but it could move, it could potentially move. That way when someone's on the phone, we don't just give them a date. Because if you give them the 10th of June and they call and say hey, I want to know when I'm on schedule and they say, oh, it's the 10th of June, we don't know the potential that you might be moving things around because of lack of employees or massive amounts of new jobs coming in. So just make sure that you put that in the office so that way we can block for you and make sure we know what's going on. And again, just try your best. I know you're busy at the end of the day to put them on the schedule. Just put them on the schedule. And then if you don't know exactly where you want them, put it in the office notes. But if you do that, you're going to eliminate a lot of calls. They're coming. Just asking, like when am I on the schedule? When I'm on the schedule, I click accept. I haven't got a confirmation yet, so that's important. Again, just a few more updates here.

Last thing I know, I know we've talked about before, but kind of a daily thing that I would recommend doing is going through dispatch board. Obviously you need to be doing this for P4P anyways to make sure you have a manual adjustments etc but if you do it daily instead of weekly or monthly, it's going to help you a lot when it comes to invoicing. And that is just make sure that when one time jobs are completed that you make sure on the dissect board they are completed correctly, that the invoice was created correctly. You either send the invoice out or just make sure that the numbers are correct based upon how the job finished. And then also when you're doing that you'll see one time Moe's or sorry, first time Moe's and edit the price. Then we're seeing a lot of people going back three, four weeks and trying to edit their invoices for the first time mo three weeks ago. And then they realize that their Guys didn't clock in correctly and now they're literally just guessing at the price. And that's a lot harder to prove. If a customer ever has a question like hey, I don't think they were here that long, I don't know why I got charged, et cetera. So again I just recommend every day check for one time jobs that need to be invoiced and then make sure that their numbers are correct, that the invoice is created. And then secondarily look for first time MOWs that potentially might need a price adjustment. I know most of them won't need that because you can mow. As long as they weren't overgrown massively, you're going to be fine. But those first time mows I would definitely recommend, you know, if you're at the end of the month like now, just let it, you know, get in the invoice and build them at the end of the month or but if it's a 2, $300 first time mow, I would charge the card and send them the, you know, the invoice right away with our invoice receipt I should say and make sure that they are billed immediately. That's what I would recommend. Cool. All right, that's all I have for announcements. I'm gonna go ahead. Any questions here? How do you balance a mowing route and projects? Give me one second here. How do you mow a balance mowing route and projects? We have, we have both but are struggling to figure out the most efficient way to add projects to our guys calendar. Do we put a product on Friday and mow Monday through Thursday, etc. Thanks.

Cool. Good question. Let me go ahead and grab a pen. What you want to do is every single week know how many budget hours you can get completed. I recommend using 30 to 35 budget hours per person. That's out in the field, right? So let's just assume we're kind of running around at max capacity because we're low on staff. We're going to have a 35 budget hour per person limit. Assume that we have four people out in the field times four, that's going to be 100 and sorry, 70, 71, 140 budget hours per week is going to be what we are looking at in terms of scheduling. Okay. Now what you're going to do is you're going to keep track of how many budget hours a week do you have of mowing, right? So let's just say now we have a whole bunch of customers and you can filter this out on a dispatch board and you can see, okay, well I have, you know, 100 budgeted hours worth of mowing. Okay? So if you have 100 budget hours worth of mowing, you now know that you have 40 budgeted hours capacity for projects. So if someone asks you for a project on schedule, you know you can do up to 40 hours per week. Now this is the thing to keep in mind when you start booking out three, four, five weeks, is that recurring mowing number is going to keep trickling up because you're getting a job here, job there, a few here, five a week, whatever it is, that number starts trickling up. So all of a sudden, if you're four weeks booked out and you might like, man, everything's peachy. I got 40 budget hours of projects on the calendar for every single week for the next four weeks. Let me just do this projects. So this would be considered a full schedule, right? The problem is if I am going week by week and I'm three, four weeks worked out, by the time I hit four weeks from now, this hundred budget hours might be 120 budget hours. And that's where you get into over booking your crew. So what I would recommend, as you look out to weeks ahead budget for the fact that this number is going to go up, you're mowing, it's going to trickle up. Especially right now, May and June still going to be going up. July, August, this is going to start really kind of panning out because you have some attrition. People leaving, moving their house basically start to calibrate or equilibrate to the number of customers you're onboarding. So this number will stabilize. But this is the number that you're really looking at in terms of scheduling to be able to know when you can put them on the schedule. And again, even if you don't know the exact day because of weather, like I know a lot of people have just gone through a couple of weeks of crazy weather and rain and all the rest of it. As long as you know this number, you can at least give them which week they're going to be on the schedule and be able to put them on the calendar knowing that you're going to be able to get done, assuming that you don't get the entire week rained out. So that's how I would do it. And then what you're going to do is like, okay, all of a sudden now this is 120. This becomes 120 hours per week for mowing. If this happens, I now know I'M either going to be going deep into overtime, which is risky because if someone leaves and I'm really in a bad spot, or two, I need to go hire someone and I need to find somebody. And if you see the trajectory of this number going from, you know, one, you know, last week was 98. This week it was 102. The next week it's 106. Because you're getting more and more money clients, you better make sure that you start tracking that because you're going to be able to tell when you need to hire somebody and when you cross 20 extra hours. On top of this calibration, you probably should be finding someone because someone full time that's new is probably only going to be able to be efficient enough to get those extra 20 hours done. So that's how I'd be looking at scheduling. And that's how if you, as long as you're doing this, you should be able to tell what tell a customer when you can put them on the schedule based upon this number. Right. What's your capacity for mowing and what is your capacity for projects? And again, I would leave some buffer room in there. You'd rather have employees getting off early on a Friday than you getting the end of Wednesday night and you're like, oh my word, I have 120 budget hours. I have three guys working for me and we're not going to get this week done. Even if everyone works 14 hour days, that's a bad spot to be in. So I would rather you booked yourself lighter when it comes to this and go hire someone right now. Even if this goes to 120 and have, you know, some early days on Friday. But guess what, your mowing is trickling up and within a matter of a few weeks you'll catch yourself and that person will be full time. It'll be perfect timing because they will have just started to get efficient after those first few weeks of training. So if you guys have questions about this, definitely go over this with Lee on a coaching call. This is what he works on a lot. This is what we, when we jumped into the location that we're turning around is immediately we had to do to cut down tons of projects that have been pushed off. And we had cut 250 budget hours. No, it was over that, like 270. 270 budget hours down to 120 last week by moving projects off and getting things calibrated correctly and all the rest of it. So feel free on a coaching call to go that with Lee.

Nick from Cordova not sure if this would help, but for new customers while doing the estimate visit I know which part of town their MO day would fall on and I would I put their default mowing date in the client's map code. Command doesn't know that I do this, but it could help command know which day I would plan to schedule their mowing route plus or negative date. If a customer accepts the mowing estimate over the phone and wants to know when we are potentially coming. Yeah, this is just unfortunately another manual step though everyone have to do is put in the map code and typically we can actually kind of tell when you're going to be doing the jobs. We can because we can just look at your route and we can see which days you do typical job and be like oh they're in this area, you're probably going to be on Wednesday. But we don't want to say that because for all we know you might have had something planned for that job or you want to split that route because that day is getting too big, you want to move it. So we typically are going to thank you and welcome email. That's usually what we're going to do. And because in that thank you welcome email you give the day plus or negative one day you tell them that and we can use that immediately. So again that's why it's getting that email out as soon as possible. We always go back to default the communication given to the customer because we don't know if potentially like I said, Wednesday was getting really full on your schedule and you decide not to split it in half. So we'd rather just go back to the thank you and welcome email because the thing that the customer shot and they don't start saying well my email says this and like oh great, now we're back and forth here. So but yeah there is a map code thing you could use potentially to do this but we're going to default to what communication is given to the customer so there's not too much confusion. So cool. That is all the information I got. One little fun quick tip. I read an article the other day is very interesting, kind of goes back to I talked about at conference like what would you have to do if you have to double your prices tomorrow? Really interesting on margins when it comes to service based businesses and is really a good mental exercise to stretch my brain a little bit about price increases and charging a premium price and how once you charge a certain level of premium that moving it up significantly actually doesn't adjust the close ratio very much because you've weeded out the majority of price sensitive people by getting like, for example, if you charge $80 per hour, you might as well charge 120 because you've already weeded out 80% of people that are already going to say no by being at 80. Very interesting. Just a mental exercise, a good way to stretch your brain. So mental gymnastics are good. Get things moving. All right, everyone, hope you have a great day and a shorter week for most of you this week. So hope you're all doing well and.