Mike Minutes Mastermind 06/07/2022

Good morning, Destination. Hope you're all doing super well. I gotta switch over to WI Fi. Give me one second.

Can you hear me?

All right, switching over. Sorry, this might take me a second. So I should have changed before. All right, I got quite a few updates, so we'll jump right into those. And then we got questions that came in as well. Why isn't this change. Can you hear me? Crystal? Give me a second. Sorry.

Sorry guys. Give me a second here.

Sorry, I had to go in a different room. So there's a few updates I wanted to share. First off, as I posted on the Facebook group and that was in relation to Zooper's going to be offering a Buy now, pay later and they're going to be rolling out later this year. So we are going to be on that beta with them. So I'm not exactly sure the timeline, but probably later summer, I'm assuming that's when that will be available. Basically Buy now, pay later is where if you have a large project, you can have certain thresholds, customers able to purchase the project, but then pay for over the course of time, kind of like a credit line. And so that will be available to super users later this year, I'm hoping into the summer, honestly. So. So I was in touch with their CEO yesterday and that's gonna be set up. Second thing that I had was.

The second thing was about the P4P handbook or creating a handbook for employees kind of with frequently asked questions where they a lot of times have hiccups on as well as kind of common practices that make them more money. So just again a third party for you to be able to reference them to instead of you telling them like hey, you should get out, get out of the shop earlier and not be dinking around for 30 minutes. It'll be a third party basically saying that. Yes. And then we'll also have some testimonials from the employees and things that they've said that they has worked well for them in terms of getting out and making more money on P2P and explaining some of the intricacies like if it's a rain day, what happened? How is it calculated in a really simplistic manner so they haven't read the book or anything like that they'll be able to understand. So that will be next week. It'll be like an 8 and a half by 11, but then folded and kind of made into a booklet so you can print them off, staple them, give them your employees and it'll have some good information for them on A PPP perspective. Let me jump into my notes here a couple other things. First thing, if you are using Service Autopilot and on basic service, if you want Command center to check your clearance, we can do that for you. We typically have not done that as part of a basic service, but if you need us to, let us know on a one off basis because we're seeing people losing a bunch of money out on not checking their clearance. Where the payment method Inside Service Autopilot says check, they have a carbon file you run it through. It says paid inside Service Autopilot but because the payment method was never changed to Visa, it does not go through and clearance side. So it's something that we manually check for all our full service. But it's getting out of hand. Last year when we caught this issue for the first time and it was kind of becoming aware throughout Service Autopilot community, we ended up collecting over $170,000 across the destination of payments that had not actually gone through in clearance. So again, in six months we will not be on clearance at all since we'll be switching to Zooper. Everything will be in stripe and obviously there's issues to every processor. But we won't have the problem of having paid invoices looking like that. It says paid and it's not. It never goes through. So if you, if you are on basic service on here and you want Command center to help you with that, reach out helpgustalongerservices.com and we can do that for you. Or you can reach out to Liz and she can make sure that we get that done for you. Sorry about the more background noise. I have to switch rooms this morning.

Last thing. A couple more things. Actually there is a thing that I saw that was somewhat disturbing on Service Autopilot's Facebook group. Let me share it with you.

This is basically saying that you need to make sure inside clearance. Again, this is just Service Autopilot users, you've got to make sure your IRS tin, that's your tax identification number is valid and you have validated inside clearance. If you don't supposedly now clearance going to take away like 30% and send that to the IRS because they're assuming that you don't pay taxes. So this is really a weird move. Obviously it's a crackdown on people trying to process payments and not pay their taxes. But the fact that clearance is doing this without a little bit more notice is a little strange. So definitely make sure if you're service autpy, please check your clearance, make sure that this has been validated. All you'll need to do is probably submit, like your SS4, which is a form from the IRS that shows your ein number. And for most of us, that's what we're going to have is our tin, which is our tax identification number. You're not going to be using your social for your tin. So most of us are going to be using our ein number from the irs. So feel free to not feel free. Make sure you check that out and make sure it is validated inside of your account. I think I had one more thing.

No, I think that's it. Cool. So, yeah, Liz just wanted to make sure that everyone knew that if you are on basic service and you're using service autopilot, you don't have time to check your clearance. It probably will take us, depending on your size, probably 30 minutes to an hour to just check every payment, making sure it's going through. And what we can do is see if there were ones that were marked as paid in service autopilot but never went through and then go after those payments for you. So just let Liz know, let command center know and we can take care of that for you if needs be. Cool. Got some questions that came in.

A couple of these just came in and then one of them was a billing question that I'll address one off with them. Let me go ahead and.

Share this.

All right, first up.

Valparaiso. Are there any training videos or explanations on how to set up routing in Zooper? I've made the route but can't figure out how to use it. On my phone I saw another one of these questions were about this too. We don't have a whole lot of mobile training on Zooper yet. And so that's something we will work on this fall a lot before January. The thing is, right now there's so many changes happening. Literally we make training videos and then literally a month or two later it's like they're antiquated. So we haven't done a whole lot on. On the mobile though. And what I'm seeing is a lot of people are using the mobile extensively, like charging cards, sending invoices, the whole nine. So we haven't done a whole lot of training on this, but we can. We absolutely will be this fall. But this is something that you might want to check in with Kevin Siraj for now, like in the immediate seat if you're having troubles with phone side of things with your route. But we will definitely be getting more training from our end this fall. Next year, I'm considering only offering mowing treatments, garden bed weeding, and winter services. Most of these can be quoted online or over the phone. Also, property plants seem to be less favored by the guys and have been and have more margin for error in terms of coating. Plus, there's debris to haul the dump, whereas we can use the green bin on each property for other services. Thoughts on a reduced service offering? I always love reducing services. It's just a matter of growth. Obviously, you're capping growth. One property cleanup could be the equivalent of six, seven months worth of mowing in terms of gross revenues. So you're definitely going to have a reduction in growth. But I'm always. I don't think I've ever said not to cut services out. Um, and this is what we're doing. We've done at the location, we turn around. This is what we're doing in Bellingham. Just every single year, we're chopping up more and more and more services. So it's just whether or not you want to just realize during your day that you're just not going to grow as much, probably. And so, like Max, I know you want. You've gone from, you know, by yourself to four employees. You're probably not going to go to eight or 10 employees next year using this method. But that's fine. Like, that's fine. The location, we're turning around, like, literally, we're going to almost half the revenue, but we're going to focus on these things, mowing, et cetera. We're only going to do property cleanups and projects for existing customers because there's usually less callback from them, there's less hassle, the estimates are easier to be done, higher acceptance rate, etc. So that's what we're going to be doing on those locations.

Right. Our number of estimates sent were down 36% from April to May. The ad spend was the same for both months. Is this a trend seen across all of guests of nation? This is a trend across the entire industry. Right. And that is that once you pass spring rush, even the next month, it's very common to see a drop in demand. Right. So we talk about at training, like when demand is high, that's when you want to be spending money on marketing. And there's even a few owners now that as they're heading to June, July, I'm like, hey, I know you just, you got. When you got quite a bit of money. Now let's slow down on spending it though, because let's keep it for next spring when the same amount of money is going to bring in, like you said, 36% more in leads and you're going to see that trend continue just because demand was higher in that month. So the same amount of ad spend is going to get you significantly more number of leads and higher quality leads during the spring rush. And that's why we always want to spend as much as we possibly can of our marketing budget during the spring rush and not other times of the year. Obviously you're trying to still grow, you still can. You just return on that investment is going to be lower. If I spend a thousand dollars in the spring rush, I might get say 40, 30, 40 leads. If I spend that same thousand dollars in July or August, I might get 15 or 20. So it's not like you're doing anything wrong. It's just a matter of.

The spring rush in demand decreasing.

I saw that half the amount of estimates in May is compared. Yep, same thing here. It looks like I know that prices of everything has customers take longer to decide and possibly get how. Do you have any tips on how to market smarter? Currently using Google service and Google Ads. Thinking about putting some door hangers out to help density and to help with cheaper marketing. Put it in. Put on my cruise shoulder to share the responsibility. I agree with that. I'd say though too when, when demand is lower, that's when we send. We really lean on one click estimate emails. We don't send honestly a lot of the one click estimates during spring rush because we're so overwhelmed with work and new leads. And I know a lot of you are now transitioning out of spring rush. It's like okay, now we kind of got a handle on it. We got a crew, we got a good crew and like I'm, I'm able to take my work on and that's like oh, let's go spend our money on marketing. It's like, oh man, we just like kind of missed out on the past couple months when the marketing would have had the highest return. So what I would do is during times when demand is low, try to farm your existing customers more. So really focusing on those one click estimate emails is what I'd be focused on everywhere in your database, really combing through them, really going after them, trying to upsell existing customers, really trying to focus your crew on that $10 they get if they just take a quick video and say this person needs mulch or they need a cleanup or they need some sort of project to be done. That's what I would be focusing on during times of low demand. Because now your customer acquisition cost is zero on those leads versus paying for leads when they're at a higher customer acquisition cost because that is caused by demand. Breakdown.

Can you show us a way to charge a card on file? I'm thinking I'm doing it the long way. I would have to send an invoice, then generate a link, then click the link. Okay, this is in the app. So again, this is in the app. We don't have a lot of training in zooper on the app yet, so feel free to reach out to Kevin Siraj if you have questions about this. But there's definitely. You shouldn't have to be doing all these steps to charge cards on file. The cards on file. I own a desktop. It's literally on super. It's like you see the credit card on the right hand side, you can just mark the invoice, mark it as paid through stripe and it charges the card. So from, from the mobile side though, like I said, to be very honest, we have not done a lot of training on the mobile app yet. We will absolutely be doing that. But there's so many things we got to get done prior that the app is going to change so much by the time December rolls around. So we will see. Not that I have this problem, but this thought just crossed my head. As we continue to raise prices over the next few years, our hourly rate continues continuously increases and also the budgeted time will increase. Imagine a lawn that takes 25 minutes of the longest becoming budgeted for 40 minutes. Great for P4PMaybe too good to incentivize employees. I'm sure you've thought about this. I'm curious that what will happen. So remember that as you're raising prices, two thirds of it is going to you straight profit. A third of it is going to be employees in the form of P4P. I believe that as you raise price to the customer, that increase of that 1/3 going employees is going to basically stay up with wage inflation, stay, you know, giving them more money. Now if your guys are making 26, 27, $28 an hour on average and some are making 35 plus, that's a difficult. Right? It's like, man, I want to put more of this money in my pocket. That's when you're gonna have to lower your percentage. That goes to the employees. Right? So if you're 33, maybe take that down to 30% and then you raise prices to basically make sure that they don't really get a pay decrease. Right. You're going to want to do that, though, during the winter when you have time to switch all of your budget hours as well as probably have a new crew coming in the spring. And they're not going to really even notice a difference as long as you raise price while reducing the percentage. But doing that mid season is very difficult to explain that to employees because they're going to actually see a drop. Or if they've been like dividing by three, for example, like, okay, I make $100, I divide that by three, and all of a sudden it's like. It's not really dividing by three. It's dividing it by, you know, it's like three out of 10. It's 30% instead of 33%. So doing that mid season, a little more difficult just to see the. To explain that to the crew, honestly, and why it's going down. But if you're able to.

Make it to where they make more in terms of. Into the price increase at the same time that you reduce budget hours, that's the most ideal thing in my opinion.

So.

I think that's all the questions we had for today.

It is. Cool. All right, guys, I will see you tomorrow again. If you have any problems with clearance, make sure you check your tin number. You validate that. And then if you are solo operator, sorry, if you are on basic services, on service autopilot, and you still want command center to check your clearance for you, we can do that because there's so many people missing out on payments from clearance weirdness with service autopilots and integration. So again, the way to clarify that is if someone is going to pay with a credit card, their payment method needs to be Visa inside service autopilot. If it's not, you will say, it'll say it's paid, but it will never actually go through on clearance. So there's all. There's issues like this with every processor, every single CRM. Unfortunately, you just think that because clearance owns service autopilot, you would think that they have a better integration, but unfortunately they don't. So. All right, guys, have a great rest of your day. We'll stay in touch.