Mike Minutes Mastermind 06/08/2023

Nation, let's go and get things kicked off. We just dropped this YouTube link into Facebook. While I'm doing that, shout out to Ryan Payne was able to get several, I think four or five of these customer reviews yesterday, which put us over the 10 marker and we have 12 now. So we're gonna start working on getting that those testimonial videos put on all of our home pages or our websites. I should say we're still not 100% sure we're going to put them. And then as soon as I as those are up, then you'll see customers videos and you'll be able to see if they leave. If they said that they left you one, you could go check within 24 hours I'd have them up there.

But yeah, thank you to those that are getting those customer and the employer views. Those are extremely helpful. And now that we're past 10 on the customer side, we can integrate that with the website. I think we have like almost 20 already of the employee ones. The more the better. And I really do think it adds a lot of value of having them all over the country and the whole continent, including Canada, US etc, especially for project based work where people are going to really look into your reviews and whether or not you're credible and they can trust you, etc. So I'm looking forward to being able to get those on the page. There's nothing like, like a Google review is fine, a Facebook review is fine, but a video of a customer saying something about you, you cannot beat it. And so we're just trying to make the design look as integrated and cool as possible. And then we'll get that rolling out hopefully the next couple weeks. Real quick, I'll say something. I was talking with.

Managers and things and one thing I think is super important or something that I would recommend or I see as a valuable trait is the inability to panic.

There's always going to be bad things happening in your business. Like.

Unless you want to build a business that is ran by other people and you're never growing. But if you're ever trying to grow a business and you're like, well, I don't want to grow August, I want to go to other, like invest. If you're investing in real estate, if you're investing in stocks, if you're doing anything else, if you, if you're ever trying to grow or expand your net worth, your skill set, your experience level, you are going to have times when you feel like panicking. But panic is never ever a good strategy. Panic Never leads to good rational decisions. Panic never leaves the people that you are leading in a place of trust towards you or confidence that you're going to make the right decision. Never.

Panic is one thing I don't react to at all. Like I, to me it's almost like, okay, if someone's really, really panicking is actually an alert to me that I should slow down and like not react quickly because whatever they're giving me is emotionally charged and typically not going to lead to a great decision on their part. And so even when people come to me with like very important problems, like okay, if they're panicking, I actually take them less seriously because that level of emotionally being charged can really, really affect the way that they're delivering their message and blow things out of proportion.

Like I've always said, like coming to expect it is part, part of the process that as you grow your business, you're going to have problems, you're going to have issues, you're going to have mistakes, you have customers that are mad at you, et cetera, Your employees walk off the job, you're going to have times that you're overbooked and over scheduled during times people don't pay, etc. Coming to peace with that will help with the panic side. You're like, well that's easy for you to say now you've gotten to a certain level where issues aren't going to wipe you out. Let's just assume that that is true.

The fact of the matter is in those moments you can make clear better decisions and be more creative with how you come up with solutions if you don't panic. Trust me, I know what the gut punch, I get it all the time by the way. Still happens of like, this is going to hurt, this is going to wipe me out, this is financially going to hurt, this is going to cost me a lot. I don't know if I can afford this, am I doing the right thing?

And the notion that that goes away before you stop growing your business, your skill set, your level of experience, etc. Is a fallacy. So either come to peace with it and embrace it and enjoy the process of building something, or stop growing because you've reached your personal capacity and you can't handle that level of stress and it does create panic. Panic is not a good thing for your body, for your brain, your relationships, etc. So just, you know, here's my two cents. Okay, let's jump into some questions.

Nick from the peen. So I had a guy reach out saying he wants to sell me his customer list. Says he wants to move on to other things. Gonna try to keep this concise. He has 1100 contacts, does just as aerations, overseeing fertilization, 100k revenue, 60k profit. Supposedly does lots of work himself. Now for the good stuff. All cash work, everything, everything is just on Excel spreadsheet, no CRM, et cetera. He was originally asking 600K.

I told him I can market and get customers $100. And he quickly reduced his asking price to $150 per contact. Let's go. I would still never pay that considering it's cash work. Half those clients probably never been serviced in a couple of years, etc. Oh, 100 for contact. Mercy. For guys like this, the only way I see a deal being doable is if we agree on a price per customer. Once they sign up with me or we take a sample of 100 customers, contact them and see the percentage, sign up with me and apply that percentage, the whole list. Have you ever done anything like this? Or this? Is there any other way you would recommend? I'm looking to buy list to grow and expand more locations.

I would definitely not pay $100 per contact. I might pay $150 per paying customer.

150. You'd still be looking at like almost 180. 180 grand just for the contact list. It looks like.

If he's only doing 100k in revenue. Let's just step back for a moment. And 60k in profit. He does all the work himself. So if you hired a tech to do the work themselves, you would literally make no more than 20k on this, this month on this business. Like this business is worth no more than 50 to 60k. Just. It just isn't. 100k in revenue, 60k profit with the owner doing all the work, you'd be lucky to get 20k of profit out of the current business as it stands. So let's throw a 3 multiple on that 60k. Let's add a little bit of value maybe for, you know, some contacts. But you know, he's out of his tree. I think. I think he's beyond.

Negotiation with. I would basically say, hey, I'm willing to pay X amount per customer that signs up with me. I would say, you just made like here's my plan. I would send everyone an email, all 1100 contacts, every person that signs up with me, I will pay 150, 200, whatever you are willing to pay. And that's it. That's all I would do. That's the only way that this, this, this works.

Because he seems like he is delusional to think that you do a hundred thousand dollar revenue business and you're gonna sell it for 600k. It shows that someone is not firing all cylinders and a few bricks shy of a load.

Landon, Tallahassee, Florida Would you ever consider letting go of Evergrow? Last month I spent about 1500 dollars $1000 ad spend plus 500 evergrow fee. I only got 5 conversions which is 300 cost per lead. This month has been cut in half but it's still coming out to 150 cost per lead. And it seems obvious to me but I wanted your opinion for letting it go. Yeah, you absolutely got to do it right for the business. Right. At these kind of numbers it probably doesn't make sense. Right.

And so a lot of well I appreciate the girls. They're honest about what your spend should be. And you know a lot of times they say 10 to $15 a day is all you should be spending on Google because otherwise unless you're in spring rush, you're kind of just flushing the money down the toilet. So what you might want to just consider is that you obviously reduce it like you have immediately cut the cost basically in half just by reducing your cost, your spend. Right.

So either a you say okay, 100 cost per lead is a lot. That's basically like $250 probably per paying customer.

Do you cut them and then you maybe only use them during spring rush, for example. That's really personal decision. We have no shoe in the game. They are simply someone that I can I, I do trust in terms of the numbers that they give you and they're very open and honest with their cost per lead, et cetera. Is I have seen also in my market like I'm not getting a lot of leads from it and so I will be cutting my marketing on the Google side of things as well. And so.

Yeah.

It's part a lot of this has to do with time of the year but you definitely got to be watching that. I appreciate that they give those numbers. A lot of agencies won't give that CPL number or anything like that because they're afraid of like seasonality and that's we're going into right now. So Kyle Tarvin, where did you get the big mowing sign you were standing on your truck holding? Do you think that is a good way to market versus door hangers? Any data? Yeah, right now we're seeing only like a lead every hour and a Half of holding the door of holding the sign. So not horrible. But also I don't have so much data to be able to say like this is the way to do it. So I'm likely going to keep trying to do that however, because mowing is like non existent in our market and like no leads are coming in promoting. It's all in projects and are basically filling up next week, which is great.

We are actually getting another sign that says for property cleanups. So.

Looking forward to that one. That one I have good hopes for. So I'm gonna hold that sign out there and that would be helpful. And then if once we're done the challenge, we'll probably get it up on the dashboard for you to be or the pro shop for you to really get. Hey Zach, I was thinking we should do one that just says something like.

Get a free summer. Get your summer product done. Get a free quote or something like that. Because I know the property cleanup when we have an actual price on it.

Yeah.

Have a summer project. Get a free quote.

Summer project question mark.

Get a free quote.

I don't know.

Because the property clamp one has the price on it. I'm just, I'm just thinking about like people who down if we're too niching it down too much.

Yeah. But I don't see the property. It could be a $2,000 cleanup.

No, no, no, no. Just. Just order both and you could even use the same exact picture. Just change the text.

Summer project question mark. Get a free quote.

Cool. All right. We will test out a few of these. But yeah, the mowing one, like literally even with the estimates I got from mowing or from the shaker board, they weren't for mowing even though I was holding a mowing sign. So I just gotta lean into property cleanups and project. Today I have three estimates. All of them are projects.

Mapadalia Delta. Hey Mike, when you have your employee doing door hangers, are you having an estimate and write the pricing or are you pre writing that and sending him to cookie cutter areas? We only have so many cookie cutter area properties in our area. So it limits where we can send someone with a stack of pre priced hangers. What we do is I'm a bit different, right. Because I'm in massive growth mode. So like I'm okay to take a little bit hit. So for example, I just did an estimate. We got one accepted, it was $59. Probably should have been 70 or 75. But I just need things on schedule, right. So I just roll with it. What I would recommend doing Matt, in your area is like do two different types of door hangers. Smaller properties and larger properties. Typically the mowing property cleanup and mulch estimates are going to kind of align in terms of those pricing and then you can just tell someone, okay, if this is a large property, do this one. If it's a smaller property, do this one. Really basic. If you see lots of flower beds and like crazy overgrown, use this one. And then you know, this one over here for the smaller ones. So you'd only do that if one the person doing the hangers can't do the pricing themselves and two or two they don't want to spend the time is required to every house actually write out customized pricing.

And it's meant. Tallahassee, Florida I need to get a loan for a truck, but can't get one because my bank from my bank because I haven't been in business for three plus years. What would be a good loan that I could get fast for 20k? No doc loan, SBA loan or another option. I don't know anything about loans outside of a little personal research. SBA loan is you will basically have to get a colonoscopy to get a SBA loan. Like it's not going to be fast. So I would not recommend that. If you need something fast, don't go to the government. The SBA process is extremely painful and long. I would probably say in this case your probably best bet is going to be through the dealer, assuming you have decent credit and usually their loan, their, their loans aren't horrible. Just depending on where you're going. If this is like a secondhand place or an actual dealer or whatever it might be. Now if you're buying this truck off of like say Craigslist or Facebook and you need a loan that way, I would personally honestly let me think about that.

Well, what went through my head was you buy the loan as a personal truck, get the loan from the bank, no problem, and then you could transfer over your, your business. But you can't do that because right when you transfer the business they're going to have a lien on the truck. So you won't be able to do that. But let's assume that you're doing this truck for estimates and you're not going to actually do like your employees aren't going to drive, etc. Maybe in this case you would go get the personal loan, get the truck, still paint it yellow, still put decals on it, but is your personal truck, you run it through your Personal, you know, get gas on your personal, etc. Get the loan established and then once you've paid off the loan, transfer it over to your business. That's probably what I would do in this case.

Without knowing all the details of your specific situation, that's probably what I would do. Chad from Valparaiso, Indiana. My mower has broken down several times this year leading me to attempt to catch up over the weekends and even into the next week. I've mowed to motor customers property two days in a row in an attempt to keep from losing money. How do I decide if this warrants buying a new mower as a backup to keep from losing money and customers? I would eventually use it for my second mowing truck. So yeah, like if you know you're growing and you know within, you know, even the next few months or even next spring, you're going to be getting, you're going to be needing another mower, you'd probably go ahead and bite the bullet out. That being said, if you have a good dealer, a lot of times they're just going to let you borrow a demo for like a day if you need to.

So I would establish the dealer relationship and maybe look at a different dealer that potentially might let you do this. Usually sometimes they won't be as that nice unless you're a little bigger and you generate more revenue for them that they're like, like another dealer is like usually like hey, if something breaks, just come on in, drop it off and we'll give you another one. You can just use that. And they've given us something that's like basically new before.

Just because they're great. But we also give them thousands of dollars every month. Right. So I would try that. Secondly, if you're going to buy it within the next six to 12 months, you might just want to go ahead and get it now. And it's very likely that you could go to your dealer and pay a few hundred bucks a month with no credit, with no interest, potentially like the Sheffield financial thing. And the cost of doing that is actually less than you pushing off MO's, losing, losing revenues, etc. My gas is enforced. My gas bill is $15 a month just for my truck. Payments on a Tesla would be 800. Drive by a Tesla and wrap it for estimate vehicle in your state of California with the regulation that just passed yesterday, your Tesla Model 3 would cost less than $30,000. If I was living in, in California now, I would be buying a Tesla because the state just stepped in with another 70$500 credit on top of the $7,500 credit from the government. You are literally looking down the barrel of a $15,000 credit on your taxes in California. It's only 7,500 everywhere else. I would personally only get the base model of the Model 3 because you do not need more than 250 miles range you can plug in at night. Your guys energy is pretty expensive there, but still yet you're probably only going to spend 50, 60 bucks a month. Your truck is also very, very, very big. So you're comparing it against something massive.

So the payments on your Tesla being 800 means you're probably getting a very nice Tesla. I personally wouldn't get that nice of a Tesla. I would get the Model 3, the smallest one they got. And yeah, you'd probably end up saving at least a thousand dollars a month. But I would definitely be looking into the. If I live in California I would be buying a Tesla right now. This is the best credits they've ever seen and I think the stock price is going to reflect that over the next four to six months because people are going to buy them like hotcakes. They're literally 25 grand model threes in California right now once you take into account tax credits because they're 40 otherwise. So fun stuff like if I was in Oregon I'd be going and buying one in California actually. No, no, you wouldn't get that in your taxes because you're not taxed. Never mind you're not paying California tax.

Recently I've been growing very quickly and been extremely busy. Ideally I should be only doing estimates. I'm currently on track to surpass 500k this year. Here's my issue. We've been doing larger projects making it nearly impossible for me to get out the field. I'm thinking I will need to scale back on the larger projects. And it's simple. Stick to simple services. What I'm afraid of going to happen is our monthly revenue will take a huge hit. They're going to be a huge step back in the wrong direction. Now my goal is to be to only be doing estimates. Would you suggest I do? Currently we have three trucks, four employees, we are running one man crews.

I need to go to Facebook to read the rest of this.

Three trucks, four employees, we are running one man crews. Leaving us with one truck, two employees to do projects. Don't overthink this. I think what you can do is simply slowly merge. Right? Projects are great. Like I'm, that's how I'm growing my location right now is like, I can get projects right away. Literally next week we will probably have. I already have a few thousand dollars on the books for next week, and I might be trying to sell this like $6,000 job. That's all simple services, bush trimming, mulch, et cetera. What I would recommend if your goal is to transition towards more simple services, is that it's okay to take a year to make this transition. You do not need to go cold turkey off of projects. I don't recommend doing that. I would. Because you have all the infrastructure. You have a shop space, you have three trucks, you got four employees. I would just make it deliberate move from a marketing perspective, just focusing on the mowing. Let the projects do their thing. You know, they'll carry you the rest of this year as things get hot and grass slows down. And then next spring rush, just know that you're going to really focus on the mowing side and you might get more picky about what services you allow on the project side. And you could also take this exact same thing in a different direction. Like, I'm going to cut out the mowing side and I want to focus more on projects. And you just build the business around that. That's fine either way, right? There's no wrong way to do it. But if your thought process is simple services and recurring, then you just. Just do it slowly. Don't think you've got to like turn a switch off and like take a big hit. Just slowly change the services. Like, we started off like, okay, we started. One year we took away putting greens and artificial turf. The next year we took away all grading work and planting. The next year we took away all retaining walls and paper patios. And not because they couldn't make money and definitely was a hit to our revenue, but overall, our revenue stayed about the same throughout those three or four years as we simplified services because we didn't try to pull everything out at the same time. Right. So. And just so everyone's clear. Just because that's what's right for camera in this case or like what he wants to do does not mean it's right for you. You might enjoy the project more and get a really few really good guys. Like, you want to double down on projects, that's fine. It just depends what kind of business you want to build. Right. So, Glenn, you should be able to personally guarantee any loan a bank will give you. I've gotten loans before doing a single dollar in business. Maybe try another bank alone. Okay. Yeah. I would recommend the same thing. Assuming that they're not allowing you this for some reason, then that's. I would. I would do the personal thing and then pay off the loan and give it back to your business out down the road. All right, everyone, have a fantastic day. I'm gonna go sell myself a job. I got an estimate here coming up, so I gotta go do a meeting. So we'll see you guys. Take care.