Mike Minutes Mastermind (06/02/22)

Augusta Nation. Hope you're doing super well. One second here. Let me just make sure I put this in here. Cool. I will put the link to the YouTube in here as well. For some of you that can't watch very well on Facebook, I didn't get a whole lot of questions, but I did see a couple did come in. So let me hop over into that. Before I do that.

Let me pop this in here.

Okay. A couple things. So for what I was looking at the other day, I want to go over a few ways that someone you can reduce your command center bill in the day. I want your command center bill to be as low as possible and especially if there's inefficiencies and waste. So the three things that I was seeing a lot of consistencies yesterday and I was looking over some things is first and foremost is ideally you want to have it where someone has to call in the command center one time to get an estimate, and then after that everything else should be like between emails and the CRM operating. What I'm seeing a lot of times, though is with people do not, excuse me, if people do not.

Schedule the jobs quickly, we're leading to 3, 4, 5 phone calls from that customer because they've accepted the estimate and it's not getting on the schedule. And they keep calling and calling and calling, like, when is it on schedule? When is it on schedule? When is the schedule? And then every single time they do that, we have to create a ticket, have to wait back until we hear back. Usually we don't hear back, and then we're getting more calls. So that's the number one thing is schedule quickly. And when I say schedule quickly, I mean, like, don't wait days and days and days, ideally at the end of the day. But a lot of the people that are getting three, four, five phone calls from accepted estimate customers that just. You just like quadruple your bill for that customer because the amount of calls that are coming in. So that'd be the first thing. Schedule quickly. That'll help you a lot. Number two, don't miss appointments. If you're going to be missing appointments, let command center know prior so we can reschedule them for you. If you miss an appointment and we get a call from the customer and we have no idea why there's no notes. We just literally are like, we just apologize and then try to reschedule and then let you know, like, that's time. And usually if now it's the second and third time, now we're getting customers calling for 15 minutes, just garbage dumping garbage on us. So, so those are, that's all minutes. That's all time. So again, second thing is don't miss appointments. And if you're going to miss appointments because you're just behind, let command center know so they can block for you or reschedule the job and be proactive instead of having a customer call five times asking about when you're going to be there. Last thing, if you are not taking landscaping or project based work, let us know so that way we can take it off your website. So you're not getting a bunch of leads and a bunch of phone calls because you have landscaping and projects plastered all over your site. But then every single time they call we're like, oh yeah, we don't do, we're not doing landscaping services, we're not doing projects. Well, let us know so that we can take it off your website because otherwise again, that's just a waste. It's a waste of your money. If someone's calling in because they saw, oh, they do paver patios, they call like, oh no, we're not doing paver patios. That's a waste of money. So again, just let us know from the website standpoint. Email franchise gust alongservices.com we're working on a dashboard this summer to be able to make it where you can go in, change the stuff a little bit easier to service pages and make it a little better for you all to be able to log in and change banners and things like that on your site. But for now, just make sure that if you're, if you've stopped doing projects, if you've taken away a certain service, if you've added or whatever it is, let us know. So that way you're not getting a bunch of phone calls.

Of customers that are looking for the service that you're not no longer offering. And you're still going to get some, some will trickle in like if you don't take landscaping, but then they say they want mowing services and landscaping. Well now you're going to get a landscaping estimate, but really they said they wanted mowing and so we're going to set it up.

So all that to say, make sure your website is not saying services that you offer. But then when they, when you're on your dispatch board and on your wiki, you've now taken those services away because that's just a waste of money because people are calling in asking for those services and then we are literally spending a couple minutes basically Just deflecting and saying sorry, I know it says on a website, but we don't actually offer those. So those are the three things. Number one, schedule quickly so that it reduce the amount of people calling all the time asking when they're on the schedule. Two, don't miss appointments. If you're going to estimates and scheduled appointments, let command center knows we can proactively reschedule those instead of having a customer call 3, 4, 5 times over the course of a week asking when someone's going to show up. Third thing, if you're not offering certain services, please make sure you take a look at your website and let us know how we can make those changes. So you don't get people calling and text chatting on the website and emailing and sending in lead forms for services that you do not offer. And they're always very unhappy because they're literally like, I'm watching your looking at your site and it says that you do X, Y and Z. And now you're telling me I don't like. They just get mad. So that'd be my three tips.

Andy. These gas prices of my bill for May was 2700. Mercy. That's a lot. The local shop, I think they have 15, 15 trucks, I think, I don't know, maybe it's 14 now because we sold one. 14 or 15 trucks, they actually didn't do too bad the last quarter. So March, April, May, I was looking at this morning, I think they spent 7,000. That's not too bad for that size. But mine, yeah, $2,700 for a few trucks is brutal. But you know, again, just the importance of having that as close of route as possible. You know, we only have to do oil changes twice a year because we just don't put a lot of miles on the trucks. So. Okay, cool. Let's go ahead and share this. I think there's two that came in on this form. Let me go back. Boom. Share screen.

There we go. Cool. Zoom in here.

Right. Max has a question. When should cancellations concern me? I understand that as we grow there will nest. There will be necessarily be more cancellation in terms of number. But do you try to keep these cancellations under a certain percentage of total customers? I suppose this has to do with yearly attrition.

Yeah. So it's very, very common to have a 20 to 25 in some areas of the country. 30 attrition rate and just people move, people change services. People sell their house, they pass away, whatever it might be. They decide to do their own lawn, they're you know, college student child starts to do the lawn for them, whatever it might be. So that's just natural attrition. 20, 30% in terms of as you grow in total count of customers, it's going to seem like you're getting more cancellations. Same thing with yellow slips. You're going to see like you get more, more yellow slips. But really it's the numbers game, right? If you have 20 customers and you get yellow slip a week, you can expect that you have 100 customers, you're gonna have five yellow slips a week. So it really is just a numbers game most of the time. And so it's just a matter of making sure. What I would be looking at is what percent, like how many new customers you get versus how many left. Right? Because when that starts equating, that means you're hitting a plateau and you're either going to have to spend money on marketing or do something on customer service and making sure you don't lose people to yellow slips. Right? So those are the only two things you can control. So what you're looking at more importantly is like how many new customers they get set up. How many did I leave and say you got 30 new mowing customers last month and you lost five. That's normal. That's going to be relatively stable. And you could basically then use that math. 30 new customers, five people canceled or say six people canceled. You could take that math and Basically note you could 5x the size of your company prior to plateauing. Because at 5x the size, you're going to be losing now 30 customers and gaining 30 customers. And that's where your plateau would come. So you can actually predict exactly how many recurring customers you're going to plateau your business at by just if you consistently track new mowing customers versus how many I lost or canceled this past month and the next that I read these this morning, that ties into the next question, which is is there a way to track client attrition in Service Autopilot? Can you walk me through it? It's not great. The reason for that is actually our fault somewhat. So let me explain. So there is a report to track cancel customers. The problem is we do not cancel the jobs in Service Autopilot because we don't want to lose the job notes. And we, we, we kind of had this, there's always this debate, but ultimately a couple years ago, like we started, we were canceling jobs and then someone would call back, won't be back on the service, and we didn't have the record of those job notes. So now we pause them. So you can do it. You can use the service autopilot dispatch board to filter out customers, use a service state that's in the past, et cetera, et cetera. But it's not not fantastic. And I'm sorry about that. Usually in essay reports you DLC terminated customers, but we also don't terminate customers. Like I don't want to take them out of my database. I want to keep them in my database so I can send them one click estimate emails. So there is ways to do it. It's just not squeaky clean in a nice report. We're working with Zooper on making a much better reporting system and actually almost matching max metrics throughout the month for you to see close ratio. It's much more. It just you don't have to do the math and you know what percentage of your revenue comes from projects versus recurring work. Zooper, we're working with them to roll that out here next few weeks. That'll be really good. So that's all the questions I have for today. There's quite a few questions the other day after our talk about acquisitions. So I was thinking if you have specific questions about acquisitions, feel free to use the form and post in there because there's a lot of people reached out to me about acquisitions the other day. A lot of times this time of year is when people burn out. So other smaller chuck in a trucks or smaller companies will throw in the towel. And so there is a buying opportunity. It's kind of now or it's winter. That's usually what happens in terms of buying opportunities for acquisitions. So there's quite a few questions the other day about that. So feel free if you want to fill out the form and have a question about acquisition. I know the other day whoever was it left question was able to put their financial information. That is the value of having this community and just us seeing that you can put your numbers in there, how much you're taking home, give me really good context. And now I'll be able make a judgment call like I did the other day on whether or not an acquisition is a good idea. So feel free to use the form, fill that out, as much information as you like and we can go over that maybe later this week we'll do one or tomorrow maybe we'll do one just specifically about acquisitions and I'll go deeper on some of those numbers. So awesome. Thanks guys. Have a great yesterday.