Mike Minutes Mastermind 06/15/2023

Hello, destination. Hope you're doing well. Let's go and get things kicked off. This is a quick announcement. If you have not already booked your tickets for next weekend, not this coming weekend, but next weekend's Memphis meetup, definitely do that is the workshop. And there's also the day where they'll be speaking and getting together, etc. So highly recommend you do that, especially if you're within driving distance. I know if you can book it now would be more beneficial to Kevin Fairburn, who's organizing everything and putting everything together. It's much nicer having a headcount a week before instead of two hours before. So if you're gonna go, please do them a favor. They're doing all the work to set things up. Please do register now instead of the day before in terms of them finding venues for dinners, etc. It's hard when you're having 50, 60 people, so please do that if at all possible, sooner than later.

All right, let's jump in to some questions. I think there's a couple I saw came in present, present, present.

Oh, I gotta drop this into YouTube. Give me one second. Boom. Playlist. That's yesterday's pod. Okay, here we go. Sorry, we don't have to do this.

Tomorrow we are playing our planning on actually going to Louisville and checking out where we'll be having the conference both at the hotel and also at the cathedral. So that'll be fun. You'll probably see the video come out a few days or on the weekend of us going there. We're just going to drive over there.

Make sure everything's good, and then head straight back. Just better for us to be able to start planning and getting everything ready to roll and making sure that that cathedral is actually going to work for us.

All being there. Okay, let's jump in my sharing. Yes. Okay.

Derek Doran, Allen Park, Michigan Follow up to my P2P question.

My question was is there a way to show people or budget hours completed for mowing on the employee reports? We asked for more context. Why I'm asking. I'm always talking about budget hours when I speak with the crew, how the more budget hours we complete per guy will increase our profitability and their pay, etc. They can do the math and divide PPP earned by their mower. However, there's no where they can see the budget hours for the route they are on. Like I can essay or in the time card for my end they see the time breach job on the essay app though, since you wanted to have A clean, simple snapshot today like it shows for project work with a budget hours completed and not need to pull out the calculator. The majority of our crews work 90% is mowing and that's what on my mind. Thanks for your time answering this. All right, you have convinced me. Let me just add this to my list.

I have three P2P features on my Last mercy. So this would be option for BH to be on employee manager daily reports.

Cool.

In like August or September we're going to reformat all those emails so they look a little more on brand in terms of design. But right now you can go to the email report settings and change what they see. So we'll make sure we add budget hours in there should not be that difficult and then it'll be up to you to just go in there and toggle it on. So I'll let you know in the updates when that comes out. I don't know if we'll do it before after integration with Copilot. So we're kind of like P4P. We have mission critical features that we're trying to get done over the next three to four weeks. Then we want to get jump right into Copilot integration which will probably take us a month. And then we have a whole bunch of other features that are like quote unquote less important. Don't, don't take it wrong if I put this one in that one, that bucket. It's just a matter of we keep adding things and we keep pushing the integration off and I need to get the integration done so we can start working out all the little kinks and things because we have July training for new franchisees coming to Vesta. They're going to be onboarded into Copilot in August. So August is kind of like in my head, like my deadline and that whole new cohort we're giving the the majority of them depending on when they signed up. We're giving them a lot of their fee relief the rest this year because they're going to be in COPA and they're basically going to be all of our guinea pigs to make sure everything's working. So for me, I just want to make sure everything's as buttoned down as possible by August. I know a lot of the features I want aren't going to be done, but I need to make sure that the PPP integration and is done with Copilot. So I will put on the list. I have three things. Last night I was talking with Zach and she came up with some ideas on like gamifying PVP a little bit. So that kind of got my wheels turning in terms of like even just when they log in, having how many days it was since their last late or call out and you know, just kind of gamifying. And he was talking to me about duolingo, like how he learns. He's learning French right now, but he learned Japanese a little bit in the past and how like they gamify everything and he thinks they did a really good job of that. So I like that idea. We have some parts of that for managers and for customers coming in copilot later this year in terms of like showing how much time they saved and like what that would be equate to, et cetera in the real world. But definitely doing inside of P2P when they log in for the day of like how many days it was since they asked late or call out as well as like total amounts that they've earned, like, hey, you have earned 64, $392 on P4P. Stuff like that would be kind of cool. So it's on my feature list which will probably end up happening in the fall, those type of things. Ken, Michigan from Dustin's question on Wednesday, could we do a phone tracker app? I even on my phone track my miles and route efficiency. I hit start in the morning and when I'm done, when I hit get home, I hit stop and it saves the route. Technically a door hanger position could take that and we email it to me. Let me see what you're talking about. This is cool. Yeah, there's a lot of different apps you could use to do this. We don't really need to build one. There's a lot of these type of apps. So what I would probably be more interested in, in terms of like, I wouldn't worry about tracking employee when it comes to door hangers because honestly it comes down to is it worth it or not. I would be tracking how many door hangers they put out and trying to get that above 50 per hour. It would be like kind of a benchmark. And then the thing is though, if they're just throwing them away, they can walk the walk. I just walk down the street and kind of get away with things and just throw them and literally throw. And I've had people do that in the past, just throw door hangers or flyers wherever they're supposed to be giving away. They just throw in the trash. And like later on they admitted it to me. Um, and so to get around that what you're really tracking is, okay, how many leads do I get a day? How many of those convert? And then running the math, right, so, like, I know, like right now I'm getting about two to two and a half leads per day, sometimes three. So let's just call it two and a half to be conservative, per day that are being. I'm closing almost all of them. So let's just get to two customers a day. So if I'm spending, you know, he's working about five, six hours a day, $100 a day on door hangers and the labor, plus let's call it $10 in printing cost, my customer acquisition cost around 55 to $75, just depending. So I'll keep playing that math. Whereas if he was only getting one lead a day and one customer every two or three days was converting the math just doesn't make sense. Now I'm at 250, $300 customer acquisition cost. So. So in terms of like tracking them, I'm not a huge fan of tracking, honestly, I just think it's kind of invasive. As an employee, I wouldn't like it. So that's why, like, things with P4P, it's like P4P says whether or not someone's efficient or not, like, the numbers just don't lie. And then like in Copilot, we can track their phone when they are clocked in on a map to make sure, you know, their truck is good or whatever. But for a door hanger position, I'd let. I'd really just try to incentivize them to get leads and let them, you know, be their own engine. Instead of you being like, did you do this? Or like, one thing that is helpful you just said share the ken though, is which neighborhoods they did. So what Jonathan's doing each day, he just literally takes a screenshot in his map app and then just like draws a circle around all the houses he did. So when you stitch them all together, you can kind of see which areas he's done. So that's been helpful. Devin from Red Deer, is it possible to do $3 million a year with 100k people? Yeah, you probably have to diversify out of just mowing. You will have to, because out of 100,000 people, if you get a thousand lawns.

Just lawn care, you're only going to probably do like 200k.

Sorry, you're going to do up probably 2 million in. If you had a thousand lawns, you'd be tough to break that. So you probably End up having to go a little more, little more landscaping stuff, et cetera. Or just over the course of time, like it would take you a lot longer to get the 1 million to 3 million part. So you just take probably 10 years or so, which is, which is great. It's just a matter of penetration and probably diversification of services you would need to do. Which is not bad.

Because diversification of services is tough and it's like hard to build to figure out systems. But it's also very difficult to have like secondary locations, third locations, four locations, have general managers, have regional managers. Like either way you go, as you grow the business, there's going to be operational complexity added as you scale up and you just determine whether or not you want that to be systems or you want that to be people. And so if you wanted to make it more around services, you're going to add more services to your mix and then and upsell existing customers as well as new customers that you would not have otherwise been able to tap into. So because of adding more services. Right. So again though, it's just, it's always tempting to do that way too soon. I see people always like, oh, I need to add services. And they're like at 150,000 annual revenue, it's like, no, no, you haven't even tapped the market, having come close to tap, scratching the market for the core services first.

And so when they end up having is 10, 10 businesses that all do 150k, you know, 150k for pressure washing, 150k for tree trimming, 150k for installing patio pavers, 150k for tree, tree chipping, all, you know, all these different services. And then they don't want to wonder why they're not profitable and have a bunch of equipment they use infrequently. Whereas if you said, okay, I'm going to grow to maybe 5, 800,000, then I'll think, start thinking about adding more services now become profitable my core competency. And then as I add more services, they're going to immediately jump in revenue because I have a core group of a couple thousand, a few thousand contacts in my database I can immediately sell to. And that's typically who does really well in Christmas lights. And I know like next week they're going to be going over Christmas lights a lot is if you have a core database that you can send an email out to and immediately get a whole bunch of customers that's way more valuable than, than, than your first year trying to do 10 different services, and now you're split 100 different ways. Like, I would really like the idea, like, build the nut of, you know, 5, 800,000 annual revenue, and you have that decision. Do you give this to a GM and do multiple locations, or do you keep scaling it up, which is totally fine. And now you have a core group of customers and a database that you can sell to and get much faster traction on any service in the market because you have that database and you have a brand authority already. So definitely helpful. All right, guys, have a fantastic day. We'll see you tomorrow. I might be a little bit late on tomorrow's because we will be traveling to Louisville, but.