Mike Minutes Mastermind 06/17/2024

Good morning, Augusta Nation. Hope you're doing amazing. Let's get started here.

All right, a quick, quick kind of announcement. Real quick. There is the certified lights webinars for Christmas lights. They have adjusted the schedules of those a little bit. There is a pinned post on the Facebook group that has them all listed as well as on the Christmas lights page of the dashboard. Those have been updated. They're going to do specific topics at each of the webinars instead of just doing generalized webinars for us. And so there's about one per month. So I encourage you, if you are planning on doing Christmas lights for your winter track, to be on those. In terms of needing to order materials right now, if this is your first year, I would not stress out about it. Most of the time you can get lights to you within a couple business days and their pricing that they're we negotiate with them is the same all the way at the end of the year. And then you just get a rebate if you do order over a certain amount. So don't stress about in terms of ordering them. But you will need to start planning in terms of like training yourself, doing a couple practice ones I would recommend. And July 4th is a great opportunity to do that. But let's go ahead and get started.

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Five questions today.

I'm sorry, can you say first question is from Ken Lynn, speaking about the answer you gave me in my question yesterday. Handing off labor to someone else hasn't always been easy for me, but I am getting better at it and I can tell. So I agree with your advice and assessment on that. When you were saying that I am going from laborer to leader, I am curious on more detail about how I talk to people and the things I say. You had mentioned that it is going to be difficult for me or anybody to change. Is there something you noticed about me or about the way that I talk to people? Am I missing something? I may be introspective enough to ask the original question, but I must admit that I am blind to the answer that you gave on that any advice will be taken kindly. I did not. I did not take. Oh, I think you meant offense. I did not take offense to any of the answers you give. Thank you in advance. Okay. Oh, man. Okay.

So I would say you could also get this kind of feedback probably on a coaching call.

In terms of going from labor to leader.

Sometimes you will.

Each of us have our rough edges, things that we think and we should not say as leaders, whether it be political Religious preferences that we have that people don't come to work for. People come to work for a safe place to be able to earn a paycheck and get ahead in their career, provide for their families. And that is like our form and function as employers. And so, you know, if we can become friendly with them, if there's other benefits that they can offer as being employees and we can offer to them as being employers, whether it be inspiration or camaraderie or life outside of work, etc. Great. But people come to work for a paycheck and they come there to be supported and feel safe. And.

That'S what I would first focus on. And so from your transition from a laborer to a leader, and a lot of times that's what people will bump up against. 100, 200,000 in revenue is because they, no one will work for them.

And this is like, this is, you know, not easy advice to give. So give me a second here. I'm not very good at this sort of thing.

Especially in a public setting. Mercy. So I think in general we have to have, if we can be self reflective enough to know that we have deficiencies, realizing what those deficiencies are can be extremely hard because if you've been around something for so long, you become.

Familiar with it and it becomes normal. So to you, the way you act is normal to every human being. Their actions and, and their behavior seems normal because they are with this thing 24, 7, 365. And so.

It takes, it just takes a huge amount of introspective and like or having really honest people around you that will tell you what, you know, where your deficit and then being humble enough to listen to them. And so if I was doing this for you, Ken. Okay, Mercy, give me a second here. I don't, I don't. This is a tough platform to do this in, but I would say.

Question comes down to do you want to win or do you want to be correct? And too many people want to be correct. They just want to look right in front of the, in front of other people. And so when you have a new employee, it's not about who is right, about how to trim or how to edge or which equipment is correct. People will get locked up over this. And especially when you switch from labor, when the doing of the work is so precious to you, someone else will come along with, have a different way of doing things or they might have different.

Rough edges of their own. And a lot of times that's why people say like, don't Talk about politics, religion, sex, etc on, you know, at the workplace is because we all have very, very different perspectives of it. And so you're just going to always butt heads, like, because no one sees exactly the same way. And so I do recommend, until you have a very strong rapport with someone that wants to talk about those things, don't talk about them. There's no reason to talk about the election with your employees unless they bring it up.

There isn't. You're not. You're going to literally make half your team unhappy. Like, I don't care how strong your feelings are. Like, well, I'm compromising. You're not compromising. You're trying to. You're trying to build a business. And so is. Is. Is the goal of the business to get more people to vote in a certain direction or is it to build a successful business? I happen to believe if you build a successful business, whatever causes you believe in, you'll be able to fund and support those far greater. And so really what the mission of the business, which is to grow, scale, and get you out of the. The labor side, in order for that to happen, you'll have to have people work for you. In order for people to work for you and be able to keep. Keep working for you, you'll probably have to sideline certain thoughts and feelings that you have in order to be able to get that compliance.

Like, not all things that you think need to be said.

And come from the perspective, like, this person doesn't think about my business 24 7. They think about it for eight hours a day while they're working here, if that. So how can I make it as pleasant as possible and as mutually as beneficial as possible while they're here, that has nothing to do with anything besides the work, and it will mean listening more. So I'm going to leave this one alone. But, Ken, I would say talk to a coach, talk to other members of Augusta Nation.

I think they'd be beneficial.

Yeah. The desire to appear right is. Is extremely intoxicating and extremely damaging as a leader. If you're trying to appear correct and you're trying to appear right, it'll come at the cost of success. Because.

Sometimes what is. What is actually the right thing to do in the long term doesn't make you look good. And so a lot of times people use social media as a way to.

I can see where there's deficiencies that they have in themselves in terms of wanting to appear correct. So whether they defend. Whether they. There's no reason to Defend yourself. Let the results speak for themselves. Like, well, I'm getting better and I just made a couple mistakes. Great. Then just go be better. Like, let your game performance. I think I still have my WhatsApp. I've had a status on my WhatsApp, like, ages. Let me see if it's, Let me see if it's okay. This is my status on my WhatsApp.

It says, Be undeniably better. Let your game performance prove how hard you practice. This is why, like, you'll see me get a little bit uneasy when people talk about how much I work. It doesn't matter. No one cares. They just want to see the performance. No one cares about how many freeze throws you took at practice. They just want to see you hit it during the game. And so don't worry about defending yourself when people attack you online, when employees say stuff, when customers say stuff. And then on the, on the contrary, when people say positive things about you, you don't need to herald it to everyone like, your track record speaks for itself. All you need to see in how well a team performs is one thing, wins and losses, and is that moving in a positive direction. And so don't worry about all the other statistics, the people saying things online. You know, the reason why most people won't become elite in their field is because as soon as you start to become great, people start talking about you. And when you become great and people start talking about you, there are inherent flaws in each of us and so those begin to be magnified. So don't worry about it. If the goal is to be elite, just go. Let your game performance show how hard you practice. All right, number two, Mr. Anonymous.

You mentioned the first two to three years aren't very profitable in trying to ramp up to 500k. What is a reasonable amount to draw from the business as you try to pour everything back in for growth? Good question. This assumes you have no capital, right? If you have plenty of capital to spend on marketing, you can usually within the first three to six months, get to profitability.

And so if you have over $100,000, you're spending 20 to 30,000amark in your first year and you're trying to just get, get to filling two trucks, you can usually do it within three, three months. The thing is, most people who have that capital also continue to grow the business like three, four, five, six trucks. And they keep growing, growing. And so there's still a cash crunch. And so in terms of what's reasonable amount, it is, it is literally just a Continuum. It's not like a binary answer here. It's a continuum. Like, how much do you want, how fast you want to go the business? The faster you want to grow, the more cash it will take. And so if you want to ramp to 500,000 and you have plenty of cash in the first year, you can get to 40, 50,000amonth in revenue within three to four months. If you just crushed on marketing and just pounded the payment for, from, from a sales perspective, and then if you stayed there, you could be profitable probably in year two.

From like a profit and loss statement perspective. And so it just comes down to like, the faster you want to grow, the more money the business. Growth sucks cash. Like, well, what does that mean? Grow sucks cash? Because as you grow, you increase capacity. And in order to increase capacity, you do what buy trucks, buy equipment, hire employees. Doing those three things will then make you have to get more storage space, increase your lot, your, your insurance. You'll have to get buy more uniforms. Like, there's so many downstream effects of increasing capacity. And that's why I say crow sucks cash.

Kyle Tarpon, the other day in a Mastermind, you had mentioned your CC bills should be 8 to 6 12% of revenue. Ours are at 16 to 18 with the franchise fee added. With the, without the franchisees fee, it's around 12 to 13%. Should be adding in the franchise fee to the CC usage bill in the equation or no, no, when I'm talking about admin, it is straight your actual CC bill. So it sounds like you're at 12 to 13%, probably in the higher end of that. Keep in mind, if you're in growth mode, that's going to be on the higher end of that, if not more. I've seen like my locations when they're in growth mode the first year be as high as 15 to 20% because they're getting tons of leads and every single month they're grow, grow, grow, grow. If you're in profit mode, that's when I see locations with full service still doing like 8 to 9%. I shoot between 8 and 12%. That's a good range. And the only reason I would say you should be above 12% is if you are in growth mode and you're really trying to grow, like aggressively scaling.

And then.

If it's higher than that though, and you're in profit mode and you're like, I'm not really growing a lot and my bill's very high, you really want to dial in. Okay, yellow slips, callbacks. Why is My communication not smooth enough to be able to make this work would be my recommendation.

But yeah, don't include your franchise fee and your CC usage because that's not considered admin cost.

If you're actually looking for like where do I put on the P and L? I'd probably put under marketing because you could just be like, okay, that's the cost of getting training the website, you know, branding, stuff like that. You could put it into there but talk to your, talk to your accountant. It also comes down to how you're expensing out your franchise fee. I know some people do it over the course of 10 years. It's a little bit of a gray area there not Vernon Efficiency score Questions? How is it that a two man crew, if a person arrives 15 minutes early that their efficiency score is lower that seems to incentivize arriving later and not coming to work early? This is a good question. It relates to something that also was posted on the.

The Facebook group the other day.

This is the vanity metric. Efficiency score is a good way to be able to track performance. However, if it comes at the cost of actually showing up on time, bad metric to be following the same thing. The other day I was like why don't we send out one click estimate emails because it will impact my close ratio because you know, more unsolicited estimates come in increases, it decreases my close ratio. I want to make more money. And so for your frontline team members, this is why you have profit sharing. To make sure that people who do show up on time get rewarded. And for the people who don't show up on time or are late, they are penalized using profit sharing. And so yeah, their efficiency score will be higher but, but they're making the same amount of money if they're on a crew of two people. And so ultimately who is going to get promoted in this scenario? Probably the person that showed up 15 minutes later who is going to probably have their projects go smoother because they showed up early and had their jobs ready to go as a net total like over the course of time, probably the person who showed up early, who's gonna get profit sharing, the person that showed up early. And so efficiency score for a day or a week or whatever like in isolation metrics are extremely, can be extremely tantalizing and lead you in the wrong direct. And so that's why in general like you're looking for trends. And so if someone is trend trending to always being 15 minutes early, this is a really good chance when it comes down to times like, where's my next estimator? Where's my next gm? This is the person you're looking for. If you. If you look at an aggregate, of course, of course. Over the course of, you know, three, four months guarantee you the person that's working, showing up 15 minutes earlier, their projects are going smoother, there's less yellow slips, they have to come back to shop less often for things that they forgot. And so it nets out. And so again, it's just like don't allow one metric to become vain, even though it is a very good metric to be able to track something like efficiency or close ratio, et cetera. Like.

Your practice will eventually show in your performance. And so if someone's not showing up on time, eventually that will trickle down. Mr. Anonymous, is there a way to group select people on the dispatch board and make it so the employee assigned to them will be a permanent. Will be permanent and reflect as the same employee assigned to the out same customer week after week? Or we need to go through each customer profile to adjust.

I'm guessing you'd have to go through the specific recurring series in order if you wanted to assign it to a specific person. You can't assign the recurring series from the dispatch board, to my knowledge. So you could put this in as a feature request. I see what you're saying. Like you're saying, hey, I want to select this whole group of people and then not just assign these visits. I want to sign the entire recurring series for all the visits selected to a certain person.

To my knowledge, you can't do that, but you can put in a feature request. And they're definitely starting to look at those now. But yeah, hopefully next few days, the dispatch board, the first kind of grouping of them, those changes are going to be made, which would be cool.

All right, sorry, I see everyone's just gonna get in their text messages and stuff now. So sorry about that. I sent it out, sent it out a little bit later, but all right, Happy Monday. Have a fantastic week and we will see you all tomorrow. Take care.